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
Let’s talk about Bob Dylan. My personal favorite of his is Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts, but for my money, his song that will continue to describe the human condition for as long as there are humans is Gotta Serve Somebody.
Are you me? Blood on the Tracks is my favorite album, and I just did a Gotta Serve Somebody post.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
Marriage as a family institution will be totally destroyed. Every marriage will be a sham marriage.
Is this the case in the military where they already do this?
Lots of young recruits marry a girl who they would otherwise just date, because you get an increased housing allowance and she gets covered on the healthcare and on the chance he dies overseas she gets serious widow's benefits. Military marriages are notorious for problems, but not I think for being shams.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
Which means that I need to quickly figure out an excuse as to why I can't go today. Guess I'm still out of sorts from the flu? Didn't get enough sleep last night? Feels bad, but I'll be able to live with it better than with showing up and getting trashed because I'm in just that bad a shape.
I've been fighting off a series of colds for a month now. It really interferes with things.
Politically my BJJ gym is kind of opposite of my rock climbing gym experiences.
Climbing gyms are self-consciously aggressively blue tribe, but secretly conservative because of the naturally white, elitist, nature of the sport. Serious outdoor sports cannot by nature be really inclusive. They can be friendly, welcoming, but ultimately the nature of the sport is that it revolves around travel to remote locations, the more remote the better, the more difficult to reach the better. No rock climber likes crowds. Rock climbing forwards the myth of complete gender equality (to be fair, rock climbing comes closer than any other real sport), and does its best to promote women's climbing, but if you're going to climb a 5.10 and she only climbs 5.9, sorry. Rock climbing gyms circa 2020 loved to do BLM stuff, often to distasteful extents, but they're all lily white. There are probably more socialists than Republicans in your average gym, but the nature of any workout is that it makes you conservative, correlates your personal development with your personal effort.
My BJJ gym, by contrast, is self-consciously red tribe, but actually very inclusive. It's full of serious Christians, gun nuts, cops, divorced dads, off color jokes, and a full understanding that the women are playing along but in a different class. But, it's also the United Colors of Benneton. The owner is Puerto Rican, the Monday coach that gave him his black belt is white, the Thursday instructor (whose classes I mostly avoid because the moves are too complicated for me) is black, the weekend coaches are two puerto ricans one a doctor and the other a truck driver during the week, the other black belts are bearded white guys. Racist jokes are occasional, but the rules aren't enforced by anyone glaring at you or shaming you, but if you cross a line you risk a bad round with Andre. Gay jokes are constant (how do you even do BJJ without gay jokes), and to my knowledge we don't have any gay guys, but if one joined and played the game, I don't think anyone would really care.
I actually explained this to a friend of my wife's who runs the local LGBTQWERTY youth center, that if she wants to help trans kids who are looking for an athletic outlet, send them to our BJJ gym instead of telling them to join the track team. As long as they don't enter a comp, which 80% of people never do anyway, they'll just be them around the gym, nobody is going to bother them. I'd just understand that if I roll with Pat that I roll harder than I would with a woman, but not as hard as I would with a teenage boy. This is already an adjustment we're all making constantly to accommodate size or experience differences. As long as you show up and try, there's not going to be any hatred.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
I don't really know, I haven't overly examined the question, I'm just quoting a history professor I had in undergrad.
There were politicians at the time who thought it was necessary to ensure that there would be no conflict between the Atlantic empires.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
To be clear: we are totally capable of gating benefits behind legal marriage, and it would increase the marriage rate to do so. To a large extent, even if it leads to lots of fake marriages and quick divorces, it would probably still lead to a net increase in good marriages.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
The criticism of the Five Power Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 is that it didn't prevent WWII, the defense of the treaty is that it prevented the Anglo-American War that would have broken out in 1927.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16hr ago
Welcome the euphemism treadmill. Erasing the moron-retard distinction is bad because it makes it harder to talk accurately and precisely about intellectual capabilities.
Warrior euphemism talk started, as I recall seeing it, with the cringey Wounded Warrior Project stuff, though I'm sure it has earlier roots.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
I don't really get quibbling over definitions, Warrior isn't bad because it's fascist, it's bad because it's cringe. "I'm a warrior because I pray in the company cafeteria" is cringey, dude no one cares.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
I don't know anything about this for certain, but the debate below has me asking a question:
When we were in the age of assassination or the days of rage or the years of lead or whatever, how many ordinary murders got swept up in the statistics? How many cases were assumed to political, which later turned out to be quotidian? How many people tried to use political cover to get away with personal crimes?
Probably impossible to know. But it seems like, if I were Nick Reiner, and I weren't a drugged out shell of a human being and were capable of planning, smearing "Political Piggie!" or "Free Palestine!" or "Groyper Power!" on the walls in my parents blood might have taken the cops off my track for at least a minute.
I prefer to just try a bunch of things, find something I'm effortlessly good at, and aura farm there
This is just the same point I'm making, but with the valence reversed: You start out feeling good, and you keep feeling good. You get better, no doubt, unless you pick a really stupid hobby with no depth. But at first, you feel good because you are effortlessly succeeding, and isn't that nice to succeed without effort? And then, as you get better, you feel good because you are getting better. Your net self esteem barely changes, even if your talent level improves.
12/2025 FiveHour could absolutely manhandle 12/2024 FiveHour on the mat. I can tell because I dominate the big strong novices that join now. A 6'2" strapping blonde college kid just joined the gym a little before Thanksgiving, and I ran into him for the first time at the Thanksgiving open mat. I don't give new guys too much slack when I first roll with them anymore, got surprised and embarrassed too many times by guys I thought were new who had previously experience, so I tapped him twice pretty quickly with my A game. Arm drag to back take to RNC, then back to the feet snapdown to ankle pick to side control to americana. That all took about a minute and a half. I took a breath and realized that he was really new, and I shouldn't be a dick, and instead work some stuff that I don't normally hit and only take subs on a silver platter. So I laid down and let him work from standing, let him get me in bottom half and bottom side and bottom mount. I still tapped him three more times, just taking stuff that was so obvious and easy I couldn't let it go without making an even bigger fool of him. After, he tells me my guard is "terrifying, I never know what's going to happen."
And that round feels good for a minute or so, it's a huge sense of victory to win a round, even a meaningless open mat in rural PA on Thanksgiving morning. Last year this time I would have been euphoric about that performance, when barely ever hit any subs on anybody. Now, I shrug, I'm still frustrated by some of my performance that day. Because earlier in the open mat I rolled with Chad and while I held him in half guard he dominated me with head pressure all round; and Big John still stumps me and what's the point of my Jiu Jitsu if I can't beat somebody bigger than me? The standard I expect myself to reach has changed.
BJJ is probably also a bad fit for my neuroticism, in that I too quickly (for my own mental well being) recategorize guys from "peer" to "he's smaller/weaker/newer, I shouldn't be a dick to him."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
Yes. It's pretty universal that a consequence that is immediate, certain, and in cash achieves more in motivation than a consequence that is vague, eventual, socially consequent.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
I'd like to try to convince you it won't, but it would. You're younger than me, so maybe less so. I've had multiple months in the past year where I really couldn't run. Once in the spring with a niggling knee injury, then again in the fall with a torn hip flexor. Both recovered, but I couldn't run at all during that period. Partially what got me started on cycling this past summer, running kept aggravating something from BJJ, buy cycling was lower impact. I'm curious if that will hold up in the second year of cycling.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I feel the same way right now. Brothers 🤝🏻
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
It's important to distinguish between entry level affirmative action, in colleges or pathway jobs, and leadership level DEI efforts.
A lot of entry level DEI works out fine, because the requirements were fake and gay to begin with. Fine grained LSAT and uGPA distinctions are fake and gay so law school admissions are only lightly impacted by diversity efforts, the black kid with a 165 lsat isn't actually much worse at law on average than the white kid with a 168. But once their careers are underway and the selection metrics are more meaningful, promoting unqualified diversity candidates to partnerships or judicial seats can really bite.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I have no problem with making up fun stories as a hobby or even professional pursuit. But when you're trying to cycle that "information" back into the real world in order to effect real world outcomes you're engaged in an enterprise that is actively hostile to basic civil liberties.
It's interesting that a lot of the problems of information that threaten civil liberties and privacy now, were originally kept public for civil liberty reasons. Property records and arrest records being public prevents people or property from being spirited away under cover of night. But now with the internet, it gets to be too much for everyone to know.
The use of public information to look into crimes used to be helpful when it took work. When you had to go to the courthouse to get access to files. With the internet to spread it, it's all too much.
I go door to door in local elections, and we use software on our phones that filters houses for registered voters, and "supervoters" who vote in every off year primary. I find it creepy that I know all these things before I knock on their door, so I always knock and act as though I'm just knocking on every door, because it would be weird and off putting for me to start by knowing their name and their voting record and their registration.
Kind of like, when it rains, my wife gets vastly more answers than I do. When I'm schlepping around in a big coat, sopping wet, everybody looks out and says what's this fucking creep doing out there? When my wife is wet, people all answer the door, oh you poor sweet beautiful angel are you ok?
Reflections After One Year of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
-- I recently read our friend @jdizzler's substack for his Infinite Jest review, which linked to his post of ten books he wants to read before he dies.* That's how I felt about BJJ going in. I'd always felt like it was something I should learn before I die, to be a complete person. About since I discovered the UFC on SpikeTV**. At the time, I took up boxing and Muay Thai because those gyms happened to be closer to my house, then fell out of combat sports after a bad concussion senior year of high school left me nervous about accumulating too many. I'd always thought of grappling as something I ought to master at some point in my life, as one of the "true" martial arts. At some point in my life, I needed to, if not master, at least become fluent in BJJ. It was on that list of athletic things I ought to do before I died, like running a marathon, squatting 4 plates, or maybe one day hiking the Appalachian Trail. When a gym opened near me, it seemed I'd finally found the time to do it, and of course being in my mid-thirties I instantly started to regret not starting sooner. Why didn't I start training when I was in college***? Why didn't I join the wrestling team in middle school, which would have been so valuable now****? A year in, I understand most of BJJ, even if I can't execute it. I think another year at least is going to be required to reach the level of learning that is on my bucket list. I may or may not stick with it past that, but it was absolutely worth it for me to reach this level. If, like me, learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is somewhere on your bucket list, I highly recommend going for it, and do it soon.
-- What makes BJJ such a compelling hobby is that you get most of the benefits of fighting, with relatively little downside, so you can do it four or five times a week without dying. I couldn't spar this hard in boxing five times a week, I'd probably do permanent damage in a month. In a way I think this is why wrestling and grappling develops across cultures as a practice, it's a way to simulate a fight without killing anyone. For the most part, MMA has shown us that the superior grappler wins the fight 90+% of the time anyway, absent a significant difference in other training or skills. I get to struggle against a real live resisting opponent ten or twenty times a week, and live to tell the tale. The primal rush makes it worth it.
-- "Fight Club became the reason to cut your hair and trim your fingernails." I started BJJ as a kind of adventure in fitness, one more thing I'd do along with all my other fitness interests, and quickly it became the focus of all my fitness interest, it took over my life. While comparison is the thief of joy, avoiding comparisons is impossible in BJJ, you know the hierarchy of the gym, and I know that if I miss class the guys who I roll with are getting better and I'm not. My work schedule is complicated, I couldn't reliably go on certain days, and minor injuries were a constant problem, so I never really got on a solid schedule of when I went to BJJ and when I didn't, and I just went every day that I could go. So between prioritizing going to BJJ whenever I could, and the constant minor injuries, I never really got into much of a workout rhythm. I still lifted and climbed and did weird kettlebell stuff, but every time I tried to start a program or plan, I'd yoink something in my shoulder or throw out my back or get caught in a bad armbar and my elbow hurts or it's guillotine week and the Poconos Gorilla pulled my neck out of line, and then I'd prioritize getting back to class and put the lifting on the backburner. I want to fix that in the second year, my goal is to get into a good rhythm of lifting and jiu jitsu, I'm sort of on a blank slate this particular second as I had about two bad weeks of minor illness and work stress, so I'm fresh to start over. I lost a good ten pounds, I want to work on a 5/3/1 template this winter, and build some more strength. Aim for 3-4 days a week of BJJ, and take proper off days instead of going until I get injured, try to consistently stick to certain days.
-- I'm also considering checking out open mat hours at other gyms, rather than only doing classes at my gym; and then on the flip side being more willing to go to class at my gym and just drill instead of staying to roll every time. We don't do a regular open mat at our gym, but when we do on holidays I find I get more out of that hour than I do out of a typical class. I also need to be better about going just to drill and not rolling, when I don't want to get hurt or don't have much time. I also might try to get a buddy to just drill with me some days. I need to venture outside of the class structure, try to guide my own learning process.
-- I feel like I'm developing a style, and I still can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I tend to be very "position over submission," a station to station offensive approach: from top I mostly pass full guard by passing to half guard, then passing to side control from there, then aiming for low percentage submissions like americanas to open up higher percentage submissions or advance position; from bottom I mostly try to get to half-guard if I'm stuck in side control or mount, then try to get to a tight waist and sweep or get back to full guard and sweep or submit from there. Half guard is where I win or lose the round. I'm constantly attempting moves that don't give up position, I only go for moves that do give up position when I have a good opening; for a while I joked that attempting an armbar was just how I gave up side control. I don't know to what extent I should lean into my style, versus trying to develop the weaker parts of my game. Probably everything, I mostly just suck.
-- BJJ has definitely proven my theory developed in rock climbing: if you keep at something, you will get better, but you mostly will always feel like you suck exactly as much as you feel like you suck at the start. At first you'll feel like you suck because you don't know anything; when you get better, you feel like you suck because you should know more. At first you feel like you suck because everyone is better than you; when you get better, you'll feel like you suck because he's better than you and started after you, or because you're just at some nowhere gym in PA anyway. This has been my experience with BJJ so far. At first I was the absolute worst, and I hated myself for sucking at it; now I'm more like bottom third or so, and I hate myself for only getting this far in a year. This is pretty much true in all hobbies: you'll feel as weak as you did when you started lifting no matter how many plates you put on the bar, as slow as you felt when you started running, etc.
-- Leglocks: Friend or Foe? is the great debate for BJJ aficionados right now. Are they too dangerous to train? You don't get the same pain feedback before the blow up someone's knee that you get before an armbar goes too far, so it's risky, put it on wrong or too jerky and you can really hurt someone. They are absolutely necessary to train for high level competition. But, you can't use most of them in lower level competitions, and if you go to another gym the "unwritten rule" is that new guys aren't to be trusted with most leg locks until you know them, so you risk causing a scene if you try a heel hook and they don't judge you worthy. As a result, I've more or less given up on using any leg locks except the straight ankle lock live, I haven't committed to competing yet but if I do I see no reason to practice moves that I can't use in a comp and screw up my flow. I also, in general, avoid moves that I have to worry about hurting my partner, because I don't like double-clutching when I'm rolling, I prefer moves where he has plenty of time to tap***** before he gets hurt. I've gotten a pretty wicked straight ankle lock when rolling by focusing on applying it, and it's become my go to in a lot of positions: it's what I fight for in a dueling leg lock, and I sometimes go straight into it from open guard to single leg x or pop it on when I can't get by a knee shield. My coaches, who are deep in the black belt competitive scene, keep encouraging me to do more heel hooks, and I drill them, but I don't really see much use for them yet, I don't really wind up in a position where I can hit the heel hook but not the straight ankle. To be honest, if you take out the straight ankle, the americana/kimura, and the triangle, I probably only finish about three or four subs a week.
-- Goals: Eleven months ago, I was getting depressed at how little progress I felt like I was making, and told myself that if I didn't get a sub by the end of February I'd quit. That night I got lucky against another white belt, pulled off some kind of half-remembered muay thai hip throw from the clinch, got his back, and tapped him on a rear naked choke. Over the next couple of months I set goals of hitting different subs, of hitting a single leg takedown, of tapping a blue belt, and finally last month I managed to, just once, sub one of the coaches. I got lucky on an ankle lock. I'm not sure what my measurable goals are anymore. The one thing I don't like about BJJ is that it's so random, at least at my gym, depending what day I show up and who shows up that day, I can be anywhere from dominant over the other guys, to just struggling to survive, it can be anything from needing to play light to avoid winning too easily to knowing that my opponent is just toying with me. So I'm not sure how to set useful goals, now that "hit X once" has mostly been exhausted. Suggestions?
*Footnote: dizz, while I admire your effort to read books in their original language, within a blog post written in English you should stick to English when giving book titles for consistency. The books were mostly familiar enough to recognize, even for a dirty monolingual, but it kinda threw off the flow, especially with Mishima in English at the end. Also, out of curiosity, do you intend to read the whole Sea of Fertility series? Runaway Horses was one of my favorites, but I stalled out midway through the next book, probably in a teenage boys inability to read books about girls.
**Is that still on? Apparently not, it was "rebranded" to Paramount, which I think is the home of stuff like Yellowstone and other boomer-fantasy TV. I wonder to what extent the audience stayed consistent, or it is only a rebrand in the sense that it's the same like channel number. I used to like Spike when I was a teenager, I wouldn't actually watch it now, but still, a shame.
***I was too busy, when not studying, trying to make the men's eight for the Head of the Charles, drinking, or courting Mrs. FiveHour; all of which seems less important in retrospect now that I see the value of being pretty close to training with early career Jon Danaher.
****Because I liked baseball and basketball better, and all the wrestling kids were juvenile delinquent tough kids who would have beat the piss out of me and stolen my copy of The Return of the King and never given it back.
*****I still shudder thinking about the one roll where I got my partner in an Americana, and started to apply it, what I thought was very slowly, giving him a long time to tap, and then this awful grinding sound came out of his elbow.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Those are unspoken or indirect or accrue over time, the military gives benefits immediately upon marriage for the act of marriage.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm not a runner, you'd be better off asking Walterodim or @jdizzler about it.
My impression is that Five hours is roughly just under the cutoff time for most organized marathons to finish and close the course up. So it's basically the max time you can hit and still say you ran a marathon. 5mph for five hours is 25miles, so you really only need to jog part of it to finish in five hours.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
It's more interesting than most comments in WW, like my stories about bike rides or open mats.
If you don't like it, don't read it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The more I think about it, it's probably a cultural failure, the Manhattan institute is a conservative think tank, but its workers and interns are still blue tribe college graduates, who understand that the statement "Israel is a colonial state" is associated with leftist critiques of Israel, which I don't think most normies would understand that way.
I actually think you could use a much more inclusive definition, like some that I'd fail, that I'd agree with more. Like "Imagine a woman close to you was dating a man and considering marrying him, and came to you for advice. Would your advice change if he were Jewish?"
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not. Conviently, it seems to go back and forth depending on whichever interpretation is the best for them. When it's time for the special ethnic groups to get their own special recognition, they of course deserve deep honor and respect for their unique history and culture- they're not one of those shitty bland stale whites who have no culture. But when it comes to break out statistics by ethnic group, they usually blend in with the general "white" category. It would make organizations like the Ivy League or Big Finance look absolutely ridiculous if they had to disclose how importunately higher they were hiring Jews than any other ethnic group.
I was thinking of this reading the WSJ this morning. In the Op-Ed section under Notable and Quotable they cited a Manhattan Institute Poll showing a purported rise in right wing antisemitism:
...A meaningful minority -- 17% -- meets our definition of Anti-Jewish Republicans. A respondent falls into this category if they 1) self-identify as both racist and antisemitic and express Holocaust Denial or describe Israel as a colonial state, or 2) do not self-identify that way but nevertheless hold both of those extreme positions.
The confusing nature of their definition (what purpose does self identification have if it can be skipped?), is used to smuggle in a mild definition to the major heresies. Colonial is at most a totally mild critique of Israel actually. It's mostly a neutral, factual description of the country's history: Israel is a country that grew out of a colonial project. I would actually expect that the word Colonial, a pejorative in leftist faculty circles, is fairly neutral in conversation for a lot of Red Tribers. It mostly has positive associations in New England, the Colonial militias fighting the redcoats, various high school mascots and college sports conferences are the Colonial so and so, the Colonial Inn or the Colonial Diner is just an early American theme restaurant.
I could maybe see saying calling Israel an apartheid state is anti-Israel, though I would still bristle at calling it anti-semitic. But Colonial is a totally neutral definition to most Republicans. Trying to portray that statement as anti-semitic is clearly trying to massage the statistics.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Eh, I'm continuously mystified by girl's taste in celebrity men.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
People who snap these days may be more likely to commit modestly confusingly politically motivated murders and try to escape rather than shoot up a kindergarten. For a while the latter was a quick path to notoriety, now the former will get you Fame and fangirls.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm going to register that posts like this have no place on this forum. We're not some gang of true crime wine moms out to ruin the lives of random people.
Mentally Retarded was the standard terminology from roughly the 40s through the early 2000s. I don't know that the shortened retard was ever formally used, but it was a simple shorthand so I'm sure that it was used by professionals informally.
It's the same dynamic, though with a different valence. The normal way we talk about the euphemism treadmill is that you have a perfectly good word for something (retard, negro, sodomite, secretary, rape victim) that acquires negative connotations over time because of the thing described, and a new euphemism is introduced to shed those negative connotations while still describing the thing (special needs, african american, homosexual, administrative assistant, rape survivor). In this case, it's not that soldier had negative connotations, it's that it had insufficiently positive connotations. Soldier was never a negative term, but chickenhawks needed an even more aggressively positive word. "Heroes" is often used for maximal positive connotations, but everyone knows it's stupid.
Warrior gets traction with these types because it pushes the positive connotations of soldier further, but eventually it will just take on the same connotations as soldier, and they'll need a new euphemism.
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