FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
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
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
13hr ago
So to summarize, it looks like the war is expanding, Iran's proxies continue to be able to strike US allies, and Iran's proxies are escalating the conflict instead of backing down.
Expanding a war is a pretty common tactic when slowly losing, historically speaking.
While the strikes between Saudi and Houthi territory are fairly well reported, what are the actual facts on the ground as far as dispossessing the Houthis of the territory gained a couple weeks back?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
To be clear my argument is limited to: this is a dishonorable act that ought to be done discreetly, not broadcast proudly, and being proud of doing something dishonorable shows a lack of character. I'm not arguing that he oughtn't to be executed, merely that it oughtn't to be on tv.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
I haven't read Mishima in a while, but I assumed it was the act of being penetrated by the arrow that lead to the fascination.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
My image of American masculinity will always be John Wayne et al, the noble Cowboy gunslinger beloved of early 20th century Hollywood and Louis L'Amour novel. And I just can't imagine a scene in a John Wayne movie where he shot a cripple. I'd imagine such a scene, in which some foppish cavalry captain or Eastern judge sent west, the symbol of government bureaucracy and oppression, asks our protagonist to shoot a cripple. The response, I'd imagine, would go something like Wayne spitting on the ground in front of the judge and saying "I reckon the man deserves to die, but I ain't gonna shoot a man who can't walk."
I asked ChatGPT for the scenario, and it pretty much agreed with me. To be fair, I could probably prompt it to do otherwise, but I think this a reasonable use of the LLM: to conjure the zeitgeist around a stock character and see what the oracle tells us.
The man deserves to die. He deserved to die quite a while ago. But I ain't gonna be the one to shoot him, and I ain't gonna watch.
I say this despite fully agreeing with you that if we are going to execute people, it ought to be the halftime show at Cowboys-Redskins every year in DC. We shouldn't hide behind medicalization and privacy. But shooting a man in a wheelchair is inherently dishonorable, even if it naturally has zero impact on the justice of the sentence being carried out.
This whole thing feels like "vice-signaling," engaging performatively in actions that the individual himself feels to be morally wrong, in order to pick a culture war fight. I don't reckon the federal government ought to be in that business.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
2d ago
I think about St Sebastian and how cool he looks, and he’s pretty much the firing squad victim of antiquity.
In his semi-autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask (1949), Japanese author Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) describes the saintly image that inspired his sexual awakening: “A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of a tree . . . Were it not for the arrows with their shafts deeply sunk into his left armpit and right side, he would seem more a Roman athlete resting from fatigue”.
Mishima famously stated that "inverts" commonly glommed onto the image of St Sebastian pierced by arrows.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
Sure, but he also wrote a lot of books. I suppose I meant more that I didn't think anyone else on this forum would have read and remembered it offhand.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
I didn't even know it existed back then
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
To be honest, I wasn't sure anyone other than me ever read that book. Was it really popular in any way?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
There was a Tom Clancy novel in this vein The Bear and the Dragon. One of the later Jack Ryan novels where he becomes president and his best buddy becomes vice president. A pseudo-Putin ex-kgb Russian president discovers major resources in the far east of Russia, an expansionist Chicomm government looking for resources and lebensraum* invades Russia, the US steps in and kicks the piss out of the Chinese invasion force on livestream using drones**, the Chicomms in desperation launches ICBMs at Washington, which an Aegis destroyer shoots down with President Ryan personally on deck***. In the aftermath of the failed invasion and stalled nuclear attack, the Chinese government falls to a group of student protestors angered by watching the Chinese army get wrecked on livestream.
The "natural" alliance theory of Russia and the United States relies on the idea of creating an other who they both hate more. This idea comes up every few decades, often with a different boogeyman. The USA and the USSR were natural allies against the Nazis. They were natural allies against international Islamic terrorism. They are natural allies against China. They are natural allies in the face of alien invasion. Etc.
One can see the outline of the logic. Both are frontier peoples, the Americans went west and the Russians east. They each have vast hinterlands of natural resources existing alongside urbanized industrial and post-industrial cores. Once you create an evil anti-western-civilization threat, they both look pretty similar by comparison. It normally involves a hopeful projection that Russians want to embrace American values, and I suppose that when the same theory is offered in Russia they project Russian values onto the American people.
The irony of the novel two decades on is of course that it was both very prescient, we really have seen the invading expansionist army of a declining power shredded live on the internet; and very wrong, it was Putin's army that was embarrassed on livestream and it has had no discernible negative impact on his hold on domestic power. The people did not, in fact, rise up after watching a promised easy victory over a declining neighbor devolve into sci-fi murderbots wiping out a generation of men. And while there may be a rapprochement between the current American and Russian presidents, it doesn't represent a personal bond between two noble ex-intelligence operators seeking to bring Russia into the liberal Capitalist future, but a friendship between two regressive oligarchies who admire each other's efforts at kleptocracy.
*Seeking to save their economy after President Ryan implements trade sanctions (due to a controversy over a forced abortion and a murdered Catholic bishop, this was at the height of the One Child policy, and there was a broad right-wing fear of the ruthless forced abortion population reduction policy. This has, of course, entirely flipped, it's almost impossible to imagine the Chinese forcibly murdering babies in the name of population control today.
**There's also a subplot where a pseudo Vasily Zaitsev old man in the mountains WWII vet snipes the Chicomm commanding general
***After President Ryan personally allows soldiers on duty to smoke cigarettes, improving morale and productivity. It's an excellent 1000 pages of Tom Clancy stuff.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
4d ago
I'm really disappointed that you just made this scenario up, rather than Ovechkin actually being the subject of deportation proceedings. That would have been kind of funny.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
I feel like that might more be the old "move" of putting an slr with a tripod in your dorm, allowing the easy transition when you bring her back to a "photoshoot" which no drunk girl can resist。
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
Oh man we're on our way to one of my favorite college urban myths: the friend of a friend cocksman (often a lawyer or law student) who required a written or filmed consent contract prior to hookups.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
I feel bad for Jane Doe
Why, particularly?
She is the one who made the affirmative choice to make this her whole personality, rather than quietly transfer to a state school where no one knew her and reconstruct her life. Even assuming that she did experience a traumatic sense of violation after the fact, I still can't get my head around just how awful her behavior after the fact has been.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
Some time, as an experiment, try to dirty talk with a partner about great sexual experiences you had. It's like Rashomon, she's going to remember it completely differently than you do. Not necessarily in terms of "consent" or whether something was good, but in terms of what happened, in what order, who initiated what. Eyewitness accounts are unreliable at the best of times, when trying to minutely reconstruct the play-by-play of a drunk orgy from eight different sources is practically useless.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
You know, this is an interesting take, because if your desired end state is that everyone involved is punished horribly and made an example of, you seem the most likely of anyone involved to get your wish. The boys have been plastered everywhere, in a way that should give future fraternity men pause before engaging in this kind of thing. Jane Doe may have been doxxed already, she surely will be by the time this has run its course. If she chooses, she may be able to scratch some kind of positive living out of it as a professional rape victim, but this is going to end up the defining event of her life, in a way that will give future women pause before engaging in this kind of thing. All 8, or however many of them there are exactly, all of their lives have been irreparably altered negatively by this event. This will haunt them on the internet for the rest of their existence, it's probably not even possible to disappear as one used to and run away to the great north woods where no one knows your past.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
5d ago
Idk, I'm pretty comfortable saying that pimping is a crime, aggravated by those pimped being even mildly underaged, regardless of the degree of "trauma" we think was suffered by the whore in question.
This is why in debates like those around Deshaun Watson, I keep trying to bring back the anachronism "whoremonger" as an insult specific to a man. The best you can say is that they were engaged in prostitution, even if you leave the consent questions alone it's still not a good thing for a man to be doing.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
6d ago
They treated her like a piece of meat. Sure, they had a couple of consensual if intoxicated threesomes with her, and that much is fine if fairly gross. But after that, they started texting each other about "free pussy." The latecomers wandered in awkwardly looking for action, and the original parties just let whoever come in, what's the matter? They barely knew her at this point. After the event, they seem only to have been involved with her as far as making sure the event wouldn't reflect badly on them, no interest in her whatsoever. (I think the slant most people draw from this is that they were worried about being accused of rape; I'm wondering if they were actually worried about everyone knowing how much they loved having sex with their bros.) "Wow, that was a wild night, huh? Well, good knowing you." And under mysterious circumstances, general knowledge of this wild night starts getting around, so the fraternity president now knows enough about this one chick to disinvite her specifically from a party.
I've talked before about how a lot of rape-culture controversies arise because under a consent-only view of rape, and a criminal legal standard of intent mens rea, you can run into the scenario in which there is a rape, but there is no rapist. A woman feels that she did not give consent, or that she was coerced into giving consent; but the man feels that she did give consent, had no intent whatsoever to have sex with her against her consent or to coerce her consent, and would have stopped within a reasonable interval after consent was withdrawn. This is a common disjuncture.
Cornell, in the spirit of an elite research university, has developed the inverse: rapists, but no rape.
This case feels quite opposite of most. Speaking as one of our resident perverts: I both find the actions of the men disgusting, and it sure feels like some of them were at best neutral on the question of consent; and I think the girl pretty much consented tow hat happened. At any rate, while I understand the idea that consenting to a threesome or even a foursome does not constitute consent to the other three or four comers; it does feel like once you've entered the group sex with relative strangers arena, an additional man or two slipping in is at worst a contact foul rather than a felony. The mindset of the man who wants "free pussy" without caring much for consent is blameworthy, but I have trouble seeing "I had sex with 5 men rather than 4" or "I did a bit more ket than I had planned to" as life ruiningly traumatic rather than mildly unfortunate.
It's tough to imagine that she would find the incident particularly noteworthy at all, but for the propaganda about trauma that she had been fed by the culture.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
I did too, mechanically you could do everything you needed to do. But culturally, the standard was a warrior main tank, so it was tough to get people to put faith in you as a bear.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
9d ago
A lot is collective. Playing with and against friends on the playground, I realized things like "Having six mediocre pokemon is generally less effective than having three good ones."
Similarly, I played Druid in the original run of WoW, and nobody really wanted a feral druid tank in original TBC. Just wasn't viewed as workable, main tank was always a warrior. Now, in the rerun of TBC, Druid tanks are very highly rated, and warriors are on the outs. Druid became a lot better in later expansions as a tank, and with that knowledge as part of the collective culture it works backward into TBC classic.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
10d ago
There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.
The most awful part of this, in my mind, is the lawsuit being filed by Jane Doe against the national fraternity, the bar, the university, and her own sorority for failing to "prevent her from binge drinking." I guess that statement might make sense in a lawsuit against a rehab facility? But not against a voluntary organization that you chose to join, which I've no doubt had a code of conduct that you personally signed stating that you would not binge drink or do illegal drugs.
If we really expect Frats and Sororities and colleges to control the behavior of students against the students' own will, then the culture is rotten and they need to be abolished entirely.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
10d ago
Variation in outcomes is a bitch. Aella is one of my favorite internet personalities purely in that there are so many men who talk a lot of trash about how they're going to raise their daughter mega-trad and super-religious so she doesn't end up a whore....and well...
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
10d ago
attending a WNBA game Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes.
My dude, come on. You're going to make the world's most basic error in facts in a post about people making basic errors in facts?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
10d ago
Perhaps I was a particularly stupid seven year old. I genuinely never figured out the Saffron City thing! I spent forever wandering around, trying to figure out how to progress the game from there, before I just randomly lucked into it.
In the meantime the Mankey I had forgotten in the daycare weeks ago was level 50-something. Which slotted perfectly into my bad/stupid team.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
10d ago
In the studies you've read, what sorts of interventions prevent the child from growing up to be a moralizing prig?
Consider that Iranian have an institutional memory of using American elections to their advantage.
Back in the early days of the Islamic Revolution, when the Mullahs had just thrown off the yoke of the Shah only to face invasion by Saddam, Jimmy Carter put an arms embargo on Iran, seeing the Islamic Revolution as a dangerous pathogen to be stopped. The Iran Hostage Crisis weakened the public's perception of Carter as president significantly during the last years of his presidency. Carter would successfully negotiate a deal for the release of the hostages during his presidency, but they would not actually be released until Reagan was inaugurated some months later. Reagan would, of course, then sell arms to Iran illegally during the Iran-Contra affair. Many have made the argument or presented some evidence that this was the result of back-channel negotiations between Reagan's foreign policy team and Iran: help us win the election by refusing to release the hostages while Carter is in office, and we'll deal kindly with you after we're in power.
Now the important thing is not whether we think that the Iranian's actions during the election were the proximate cause of Carter's electoral loss, or even whether Reagan sold arms to Iran because of some backroom deal. What matters is whether the Iranians themselves believe this version of events.
And it's not so crazy as a theory of foreign policy. Consider the famous 2012 open-mic incident in which Obama told Medvedev that he would have more flexibility to deal with some issues after the election.
It's probably fairly routine for American administrations to, sub rosa, tell international partners not to screw things up too badly before an election, after which they can take a freer hand.
I actually suspect that some of Trump's public signaling around the midterms, particularly his statements that "we're going to end the war after the midterms," reflected not a plan to escalate, but a plan to de-escalate and sign a deal, with the midterms acting as a signal to Iran: hey you just need to make it to November without rocking the boat and then we'll give you what you want, but we can't sign that deal now because it will cost us the election. Not that anything the Trump admin says to anyone, let alone to Iran, is reliable evidence of their intent to follow through, but it seemed to me that was the signal they were trying to send.
Anyway all of this is to say that the Iranians might believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can use the elections as leverage to negotiate with America on the war. They may be incorrect, but that doesn't mean they don't think it. If politiical actors were always right and never made incorrect strategic guesses, we wouldn't be in this war to begin with.
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