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
42m ago
I don't really think anywhere needs more sovereignty than Alabama, so as long as it's made a state I think it's a positive thing to bring it into the union. Good first step to adding Cuba, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and every Canadian province.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12hr ago
A great man has passed.
We at the Wawa Nationalist Front wish to offer our condolences to our chivalrous foes at Sheetz on the death of Mr Sheetz. We may disagree with Sheetz customers on matters of taste, decorum, basic hygiene, and just how sweet you can make a coffee before it's inedible. But I will forever remember how hilarious I found it that Sheetz was founded and owned by Mr Sheetz, and when you're REALLY drunk at 2am there's nothing like a $6 triple fried app sampler.
You can kill the man, but not the idea.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
WSJ, but same difference.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19hr ago
"Spending time with small children is boring and I hate it and would prefer to do as little of it as possible" is a classic scissor statement: some large portion of the people who read it think it is obviously true and no right thinking non-lobotomized person could think otherwise, and some large portion of the people who read it think it is obviously false and no right thinking person with a soul could think it was true.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
This is a remarkably good scissor statement, in that I find the people being mean to him insufferable, and even inasmuch as I might find the Sillicon Valley Crypto Guy of it all mockable, I still have an innate rage at people dismissing him as a shitty dad.
So despite knowing that I'm falling for a scissor statement and starting a fight for no reason, I'm going to do it anyway: if you want to call this guy a shitty dad I don't want to hear you bitch about the TFR.
There was a letter to the editor in the WSJ this morning that I took a picture of to remember, from Leah Libresco Sargeant, replying to a prior article by William Galston title "America Needs More Husband Material" about how men need to shape up so they can get wives. Sargeant cites surveys of high school seniors showing that a declining percentage of young people feel that they will be "very good" spouses. The money quote that stuck out to me:
Giving [kids] more lectures on how important marriage is won't do it, they think so highly of the institution that they judge themselves incapable of living up to it.
((She goes on to say kids need more self organized play to develop into marriage material, citing her homeschooled husband's experience running a youth theater company. I should look her up and see what her arguments are outside two paragraphs of newsprint.))
My brother-in-law is a fantastic dad, he spends a ton of time with my niece and nephew, he dedicates himself to them, they are always the number one priority, he values nothing else. My own father, who was a great father to me*, frequently jokes that BiL makes him feel bad about the time he spent with us growing up. Frankly, if I couldn't have kids until I wanted to be a dad the way my BiL is a dad, I will never have kids. I will never want to spend all day with my two year old. If that's the standard for having kids, I will never meet it, and a lot of other people won't either.
If we are trying to convince people to have kids, especially conscientious neurotic high achieving people who we really want to have conscientious high achieving kids, then setting impossible standards will not achieve it.
As to the "this is distasteful and shouldn't be shared" thing, it feels very odd to me, like a blue haired wokie screeching about misogyny because of a bland "women be shopping" joke. Just a massive example of the political correctness commissars telling people what they are and aren't allowed to feel, and what feelings they are and aren't allowed to talk about. "YOU WILL PLAY WITH THE TODDLER, YOU WILL ENJOY IT, PARENTHOOD IS JOY!"
When parenthood was more normalized, bitching about it was too! Don't start the politically correct cycle of gatekeeping who is and isn't allowed to be a parent and how they are allowed to feel about it, it will not increase the number of people having kids one iota.
*Your opinion of the results may differ.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Yes, absolutely. The average person isn't going to go to their priest frequently for such guidance and help, but only a minority of people need to go to a therapist either.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Why do you assume the next man up will be marginally preferable to Maduro?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
No, I just woke up in the morning hoping we weren't going to spend $3,000,000,000,000.00 killing ten thousand brown people again.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
That doesn't really point to Cuba being "allowed" to exist peacefully in opposition to the United States.
The reason Cuba has been "allowed" to exist for so long is not out of some reasoned exception to the Monroe Doctrine, it is simply because the Castro regime has historically been competent and popular enough that overthrowing it has not been practical.
In Venezuela, Chavez poked the United States more than Maduro ever did, but he was a competent strongman and so he lived to die of cancer in power.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Yet it is still subject to an incredibly harsh embargo. Long after similar "communist" regimes and direct Russian allies that killed relatives of mine have become major trading partners. That doesn't really fit with "allowed."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
How is Cuba an allowed exception? Cuba is still embargoed, despite being no worse than Vietnam.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
It's not at all clear why Big Oil would want venezuelan oil on the market at a time when prices are too low for shale. If anything a war for oil conspiracy would rely on taking oil production offline to raise prices.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Praying on this one.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
However fun or not-fun the original story was or wasn't, this exchange is comedy GOLD.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Do you believe in therapists?
No. Much better off with a priest.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I never watched Heroes when it was on the air.
I think anthologies work in niches, and I'd like to see them done more. American Horror story is on season 1,000,000 or something, and Nero Wolfe was great for the 18 people who watched it on A&E back in the day. But yeah, there's such a different mindset out there that people just want to see their faves on camera over and over. With production costs presumably dropping in the future, we're all going to have to get better at deciding what stories are canon and which aren't.
What I really miss is episodic tv! Law and Order, you never learned shit about Jerry Orbach, Benjamin Bratt, Sam Waterston or Jessie Martin across decades of murders. Every plot was self contained, you never needed to know what happened in yesterday's episode to watch tonight's, every night's another murder. There was no overarching plot or character development. Suddenly everything needs to build to something.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I haven't watched Season 5, I stopped watching midway through Season 3 when I just lost interest and no longer felt like it was going anywhere, and it seemed to run out of steam by the end of Season 2. Season 1 was brilliant, and artistically they should have stuck with the original plan and made the series an anthology with each season running as a different story set in a different place in a different decade. Cash wise, I probably can't argue with what they did, though, the public screams for slop. The show was basically always going to turn to shit once season 2 was put into the works, there was no way to maintain quality.
Season 1 is brilliant because it interweaves three scifi/horror movie genres simultaneously, the kids are doing ET while the teens are doing a slasher film and Joyce is doing a poltergeist movie. They can't know about each other until the end, because if they did, the parents would quite obviously stop the kids from participating. To do otherwise is to ruin the vibe, because at that point the kids aren't normal kids anymore. I can kind of accept that "one big adventure" gets swept under the rug for both the kids and the deep state abandons the project and they go back to more or less normal as the easiest way forward. You can't do that for five years in a row, it just doesn't make sense. At some point the parents are going to move away, or the deep state arrests everyone in the family or send their kid to military school etc to keep them out of danger.
Simultaneously, there's some genuinely good expectation-subverting storytelling in the slasher plot. Nancy, Johnathan, and Steve are framed as the good girl, the maligned nerdy creep with a heart of gold, and the rich jerk/jock. The classic way this plot works is that the girl starts out with the jerk/jock and then realizes that the creep has a heart of gold, and when the creep acts with heroism in the face of the supernatural danger he gets the girl. Season 1 does a great job subverting our expectations: in the climactic fight, it's Steve who shows up out of nowhere and proves that he has the heart of gold and courage to spare, and afterward he buys Johnathan a camera to replace the one he broke. This is genuinely feminist film-making: Nancy isn't a prize to be won by being right about the monster, she isn't obligated to get with Johnathan because he's proven himself, Steve isn't jealous of their friendship and bond, and Johnathan is happy with that status. This is good storytelling!
So of course they have to fuck it up, and get Nancy and Johnathan together, and turn Steve into the butt monkey over seasons 2 and 3. They don't even do the feminist girlpower slop right!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
When I was about Will's age my dad once told me he hoped I was gay because I'd never be strong enough to attract a woman. We were working on some home project and I kept fucking it up and he kept yelling at me and finally he snapped and really gave it to me. And my dad is pretty nice and loving and not at all like Lonnie!
Being called queer != Being queer. Especially not before 2010 or so.
Like yeah it's in the "text" that someone called him queer but it's not conclusive that he is queer.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Fitness Goals for 2026
-- Enter a BJJ Tournament This spring/summer is probably the best time to do it, maybe in my entire life because the weirdness of the belt system. The odd structure of the sport, with tournaments gated by experience through belt level, means that right now I would compete at white belt. Looking around my gym, I'm rolling about the middle of the blue belts nowadays, some vastly better and a couple clearly worse but mostly I can hang these days. I'm realizing that my coach seems to stick to the two-years-a-belt rule of thumb, not to kvetch on the internet about things that don't matter, but there are recently promoted blue belts that I smoke every time we roll, so I figure if I keep going I'll probably get stuck with a blue belt some time between November and next February. Which promotion I'll accept or maybe even be happy about in itself, but it also means if I wanted to enter any tournaments next spring I'd be competing at blue belt, and I won't be that good for another year or more after that, and at that point who knows. All of which adds up to the ideal dip-my-toe-in comp window being this spring/summer. Some people recommend competing immediately, but last year I felt like I still didn't know enough, I still felt like there were too many positions where I was just out of ideas. Now I know at least a few moves from any position. Achieving this goal and putting in a good showing will mean managing my weight to a target, keeping overall fitness high, and tightening up a lot of my BJJ technique.
Sub goal: attend open mats at six gyms other than mine.
--Ride a Full Century I've documented my efforts so far here. This spring or fall I want to do the full 100 miles. Got bored of my username, need a cardio challenge to update it. Next up is a 100km ride for a metric century, and if that goes well I'll go for the 100 miles. I have the bike dialed in for it, I have the route planned, just a matter of sticking to it and putting in the work. Achieving this goal will require sticking to my cardio routine, practicing longer distances, and disciplining myself not to dilly dally on a longer trip.
Sub goals: finish a 100km ride, finish a sub 2hr 50km anywhere.
-- Hit an 1100lb powerlifting total This isn't terribly impressive, and honestly it's something I could have supertotaled already, but I've never done it all in one day, and I need to get back to lifting after a year fucking around with BJJ. Part of the problem is that with BJJ I"m constantly picking up some minor injury that interferes with lifting. Nothing major, but under ordinary circumstances I would basically avoid or scale back lifting if I had a stiff neck or a sore elbow until it got better, which is good advice when lifting is the only source of injury, but doesn't work when BJJ is the source of injury.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Second - how do I keep my shit together?
I've been going through something similar with my father, though it sounds like we have a very different relationship. My father had a heart attack over the summer, and hasn't been able to walk properly or live independently since for a variety of reasons. He just turned 80, and I've had to learn to live with the fact that he's on his way out, and support my mother and him in the process.
And I think the biggest thing that gets me through it is thinking of myself as a dutiful son, as doing a good thing by caring for my father. While I love my sister, at times this does extend to thinking (quietly to myself) that I'm doing a better job at being a good kid than my sister is. Which I would never say to her, but there's nothing wrong with taking pride in your good deeds.
Your father is going to die. My father is going to die. We have duties as sons, and discharging them well is a good thing to do, and we can take pride in that. We can face the funerals knowing we did everything we should do.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I recently got triggered by a scene in a book
On my honeymoon, my wife and I made edibles for the first time as a wedding gift for my wife, and I got destructively high and we watched the musical Chicago on VHS, and I was so stoned that the dancers fascinated me, and I remember thinking to myself "Wow, it would really suck to live in this culture and see this stuff and never get laid."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I frequently tell femcel friends that statistically the man you're going to end up with is a few inches shorter and a few shades browner than your ideal.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
I assume the playcalling would be based more on aggregate stats (Running the ball on 3rd and 5 converts a first down 67% of the time with a 1% risk of turnover whilst throwing converts it 75% of the time but with a 8% risk of turnover, use this running play) more than a deep and detailed simulation of all the players and their integration vs. the other team.
I think even publicly available models could do better than that. Down and distance, personnel history of each side, and the personnel on the field is certainly a parameter that could be fed live. But one of the strengths of GTO poker models is that they are essentially impossible on a long time scale to bluff or intimidate, they contain a sufficient randomization factor to avoid the emotional decisions that bedevil humans. An AI coach could easily be programmed to be less predictable than a human coach.
Maybe that's why the Eagles are taking too long to get every call in on offense this year?
While I don't always agree with Yarvin's extremely pessimistic take on right wing politics, I have to admit that the app idea is incredible! This is one of those ideas I read and thought... huh, why don't we already do this in politics?
Because the two party FPTP system has produced incumbents who do not benefit from a more engaged voting base. Democracy is fundamentally evolutionary rather than intelligently designed, those currently in power have been produced by the current system, and changing it means undermining their own success. Using an app-style gamified setup would alter the makeup of the electorate, and that would change who gets elected.
Every member of congress won a party primary voted in by people who currently vote in party primaries, then won a general election won by people who currently vote in general elections. Altering the makeup of the electorate will result in fewer incumbent members of congress being reelected.
The makeup of the electorate can be changed only when one or another existing faction within the party seeks to change the rules to benefit themselves, or when an outside force appears that hacks the evolutionary created rules. Trump(ism) was such a force: Trump did not have majority support within the existing Republican electorate when he announced, but he was able to hack the system and stack enough wins to become inevitable before a single competitor could be settled on. The primary had settled in the past into a mix of formal rules and customs where a lineup of evangelical conservatives and a lineup of moderates would run a series of primaries until settling on two champions to duke it out. Trump stepped into this structure, which was not created and negotiated for the purpose of the MAGA faction seizing power, and hacked it by inventing the MAGA faction which transcended these boundaries. It was both radically more socially conservative than the evangelicals on immigration and anti-feminism, and radically less socially conservative on gays and the sexual revolution more generally; he combined an aggressive nationalism which appealed to NatSec neocon moderates, with feigning a libertarian anti-interventionist condemnation of nation building adventures abroad.
Such a solution to political party engagement will exist where and when it benefits the existing power bases, and not otherwise. What allowed the MAGA faction to hijack the existing Republican party and skinsuit it was that it hacked the system in an accidental ambush not by elaborate plan.
Further:
people sign up to an app for their preferred political party, and then the political party gamifies political action. If you sign up, download the app, and pay your dues, you get basic party affiliation. If you go vote in an election or two, you get a badge. If you go and engage in some activism or political volunteering, you get an even doper badge, level up, or whatever.
Is already really close to how things work now if you show up at the local level. You do small things, which gain status, pretty soon you can do bigger things. It just happens in real life, and less legibly to those used to sitting behind screens and getting XP for completing quests.
Where I disagree with Yarvin's essay is that I don't think MAGA has failed, I think that the hard MAGA faction within the Trump administration has specifically come to the realization that they will not have time to build anything before they lose and run out of steam. What they do have time to do is destroy. They can't build a new international order, but they can so undermine the reliability of the United States as a partner that no future neocon administration will be able to find willing patsies and partners. They can't actually build an American manufacturing base, but they can destroy the decades old system of international cooperation such that it cannot easily be rebuilt. They can't rebuild the federal government, but they can make it an unreliable and annoying place to work. I think that DOGE and MAGA have achieved a great deal of destruction in the federal government through weaponized incompetence and chaos, and that it will not be rebuilt in our lifetime.
PS: I don't know if he's lost his fastball or I just lost interest, but I find Yarvin increasingly unreadable lately.
Yes. 2 senators each, plus a rejiggering of the house.
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