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
2hr ago
World War Z was released on the upswing of Peak Zombie, and now we're well into the downslop. I loved zombie apocalypse content around high school in 2010 or so, but by the time The Walking Dead was big and the World War Z movie came out, it was just so beaten to death and cliche that I was sick of it all.
As an aside, I believe that is what is preventing GRRM from ever finishing The Winds of Winter, he probably had ideas for how to really play with and subvert tropes around zombies in fantasy/horror...and then a hundred other major zombie properties came out between when he started the series and when he got to TWOW, and a thousand more have come out while he's working on TWOW. My personal theory:
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
Headlines from the future:
Graham Platner in Hot Water After "Sieg Hiel" Salute at State of the Union: Platner says it was "clearly satire"
Graham Platner Spotted Driving with "I bought it before we knew he was crazy" bumper sticker on his Volkswagen GTI
Controversy Swirls Around Platner's "25 Point Plan" for the Democratic Party Platform
Senator Platner, Secretary Hegseth, FBI Director MIA: The three haven't been seen in public for three days after Platner offered to "get out a bottle" at Oversight Hearing.
Senate Debates Censure or Removal of One of its Own: Senator Graham Platner of Maine faces consequences from punching President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner in the face at a meet and greet; Platner retorts that "everyone wanted to."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
I guess I wasn't clear in my meaning, because I didn't think the point needed to be explicated at length.
People are not objective when talking about former, or current, lovers. There is no "real" and no "truth" to be found in their accounts of their former lovers. I don't know if she's lying in the sense of knowingly telling a falsehood, or telling the truth as she experienced/remembers it, and I have no way of knowing. The testimony of ex-gfs is useless, because they are in most cases incapable of objective truth, it's too close to their self.
This is not an area of human experience that can be explained through litigating facts and evidence.
This is Brett Kavanaugh all over again. Some things just shouldn't be talked about, because it's pointless to talk about them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
There's two different kinds of fraud. You have a fake election: there are no votes you just make it up. That can be done quickly. Then there's a real election where you insert enough fake votes to make up the difference at the end, that has to be done slowly.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The incentives are mixed, they want high circulation of their articles and they want people to pay for them, price discrimination not total lockout.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Ok and?
Women criticize ex boyfriends constantly and absurdly. I was confused by this, when I was in high school. Melodramatic nonsense.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
You're probably reaching back to something like LBJ's Texas Senate race, where the candidates and their machines would hold counties in reserve to play against each other like trap cards, with each county having the margin needed to counter your opponent's reveal until they ran out.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Vote blue no matter who was only ever a hammer used to convince leftists to moderate, never a tool used to make moderates move left.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
What does "real" even mean when you're asking someone's ex-gf questions about them?
The baseline expectation should be that if you ask a woman about her ex-bf, she'll describe him as some mix of narcissist/manchild/abusive/idiot/loser. Anything positive is actively surprising.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
This is the level of attack ad the anti-Platner team is running: ex-gfs interpreting bad jokes in the most aggressive way possible.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
He's the real life Almost Politically Correct Redneck:
Rape is about power, therefore I want to rape another man if he fucked with me, for the power.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Considering he easily has the resources to make this move more surreptitiously if he wishes, I would say that him making it so public belies it being a move motivated by fear.
Certainly, which means that by making it publicly and stating that part of the reason has to do with the state of the US vs the state of Argentina, he's making a deliberate action to make that statement.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I feel like there's a certain tone that attacks on candidates take, you saw it with Trump and with Mamdani, that goes something like "You aren't allowed to like this guy." We'll see if the pattern holds with Platner.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Why is Peter Thiel Moving to Argentina?
Some Irresponsible Speculation
Billionaire Investor and ideologue Peter Thiel has publicly announced that he is moving to Argentina. Among a grab bag of explanations that included nuclear war and AI risk, along with the obvious implications of the California wealth tax on his residency, Thiel reportedly was concerned about the political direction of the United States. Given Thiel's ties to much of the American political right, what does this tell us? What should our Bayesian update be from this information?
Some possibilities:
-- Get the obvious out of the way: Nothing ever happens. This is a non-event, Thiel is moving for publicity or tax reasons, and the announcements are just him engaging in punditry.
-- Alternatively, none of this may indicate anything because Thiel himself might be stupid/mistaken/prejudiced/insane.
-- Thiel is in deep with MAGA, but thinks that the wind is changing direction, the MAGA project has failed, and he doesn't want to be left holding the bag in America when the left comes back into power. This seems like a sub implication of the action even if he doesn't believe it, because his very act of fleeing and blaming the political climate will tend to reinforce the idea that MAGA has failed and increase the odds of it failing.
-- Alternatively, Thiel thinks MAGA will be triumphant, but Thiel is on the outs with The Donald, and he is concerned about being targeted after Trump turns on him. Moving to Argentina is an attempt to hedge risk.
-- Thiel is a true believer in the Argentine project, and thinks Millei-ism will succeed beyond all our wildest dreams.
It feels like something big for Thiel, who is intelligent and well informed if perhaps nuts, to make this move and publicly announce it is motivated by the state of the union.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
I mean who cares? The annoying thing about this is getting dragged into a Trump discussion when it's a "$100 bills aren't big enough" discussion we need.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
@FiveHourMarathon Did you ever end up tackling your 100-miler?
I have not. I'm still hoping on doing a 100k this spring, but my pregnant wife has been much less tolerant of hobbies that involve me leaving for hours during time I could be spending with her. Which is, yeah, totally reasonable. But complicated by her disjointed sleep patterns, which no longer allow me to easily sneak out at 5am and lose nothing.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
The thing that broke the timeline was the Cubs winning the world series and Leicester winning the EPL. After the writers paid off those storylines, it was clear the series had jumped the shark.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, and like any foreign country Symbols of wealth aren't necessarily easily translated. The great Agatha Christie quote applies:
I never thought I would be so rich as to afford an automobile, or so poor as to be unable to afford a maid.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
I think we're overdue for a $250 bill. From 1969 when the $100 became the largest banknote, we've seen inflation to where the $100 in 1969 was worth about $800 today.
Large cash transactions are becoming difficult. If you sell an old car for $5,000 cash, just the act of accurately counting to 50 is difficult and introduces easy honest errors, which are impossible to distinguish from easy dishonest errors. Counting to 20 is much more reliably accurate.
A $100 bill in an inside jacket pocket or folded up in a cubby in your car were enough to get gas dinner and a cheap motel room in an emergency when I was a kid, now it's barely enough for the gas depending on your vehicle. A single $250 bill would serve a similar purpose today.
So it should be a Donald. After he's dead.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
That’s kind of like blaming South Carolina for the Civil War.
So, basically accurate.
My prediction going into COVID in March 2020, which might have been on here but I'm not sure, was that 500,000 was my over/under number. Fewer dead than that and Trump would win, more dead than that and Trump would lose.
You also have a lot of old people who didn't vote at all for various reasons. Fear of getting sick, inability to get to the polls, etc. This didn't cross over perfectly with politics as most people think, probably closer to 70-80%, which is a vast supermajority but not 100%, there were also a lot of Republicans or Dale Gribble covidiots out there.
It was a weird year where everyone and everything was weird, so it's easy to write off the result as not terribly indicative of what's going on. Like a baseball game with multiple rain stoppages.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
x to doubt. He eats a lot of McDonald's and thinks that cardio is actively bad for you.
And much like Joe Biden, he might be alive but he will not be 100% of himself throughout his sunset years.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
So why amid generalized disaster is Trump scoring so many primary victories?
My on the ground experience of Republican primaries locally is this: Hardcore MAGA controls the Republican party in a holding company structure. Hardcore MAGA voters make up too much of the primary electorate to make any other path practically possible, if the MAGA vote is against you even where they don't make up a majority you'd have to run the table on the remaining electorate to possibly win, and you're not going to do that.
So even if the electorate as a whole turns against Trump, or the Republican primary electorate does, it doesn't matter if the 35% approval floor he still has is an insurmountable challenge to defeat in the primary.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
This feels like the male Feminist version of They Very Much Did Kill Jesus.
There's never been a draft in recorded history that wasn't opposed, protested, dodged, avoided, manipulated. People very much did bat some eyes during the Civil War in NYC, lynching some unfortunate blacks who happened to be on hand because they didn't want to fight for them. In WWI, gangster Lucky Luciano famously intentionally contracted gonorrhea to fail his draft board. Others overate to come into the exam obese, or paid off local doctors to diagnose bone spurs which kept them out of the army but didn't affect their athletic careers. Politicians sons who supported the war joined the National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, and in more serious wars there is of course a long history of politicians and their friends landing desk jobs that mostly avoided combat while still getting a pretty uniform to pose in.
History is full of people who flee the country, change their name, desert the army, fake injuries, malinger, goldbrick to get out of military service. We can find evidence of it going back thousands of years. If they didn't, the draft wouldn't be necessary. The whole point of a draft is because sending men to die for their country, in that particular war, is not popular enough to draw volunteers.
Donc, continuing our parallel for a second, the key ingredient to convincing men and women to sacrifice their lives for your civilization is making sure your civilization has a good enough story to make it worthwhile. You aren't getting a million zoomer boys into Iran without a draft, you aren't getting millions of babies out of zoomer girls without explaining to them a positive vision of what they are having those babies for.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
He’s not leaving.
The man is 80 years old, he's leaving at some point.
It's a literary debate grenade I throw out every few months when someone brings up Game of Thrones, how GRRM set out consciously with the goal of critiquing or debating or surpassing Tolkien, and ultimately failed because he was unable to write an ending.
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