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
12d ago
-- I'm extremely personally non-violent, I haven't been in a fistfight in a good decade or more at this point and avoid personal violence, and politically I am typically anti-war; but we should vastly expand the legal and social acceptability of mutual combat and "fighting words" defenses to normalize fighting between men.
-- I'm anti-tariff, but I personally try to buy MiUSA (or at least MiFirstWorld) items, and think we should make it a goal to foster and preserve at least some American manufacturing across all categories of goods.
-- I'm in favor of high legal immigration, and of a fine-based or Jizya oriented path to citizenship for aliens already in the country; it's a national travesty to have illegal immigrants holding jobs and owning homes in the USA. Just not enforcing the laws and not living with the consequences of laws that have been passed is insane.
Can anyone explain America's love affair with the pickup truck?
I'm reminded of the odd demographics/tribal affiliations of this forum reading the replies you got. The luxury 4wd pickup truck is the greatest motor vehicle ever constructed for your average American suburban/rural man, it's available at a reasonable price from numerous manufacturers, and the drawbacks mostly don't matter to the people who buy them. If you compare them to other choices along the metrics that matter to the people that buy them, the big dumb pickup truck, much maligned, wins frequently.
The modern American pickup truck is as comfortable as any luxury car, with enormous storage capacity, complete capability across any situation, power and style. But most importantly: people buy them because they like them:
So what do people actually like about trucks? According to Edwards, the answer is counterintuitive. Truck drivers use their trucks very much like other car owners: for commuting to and from work, presumably alone. The thing that most distinguishes truck owners from those of other vehicles is their sheer love of driving. “The highest indexed use among truck owners is pleasure driving,” says Edwards. Truck drivers use their vehicles this way fully twice as often as the industry average. “This is the freedom that trucks offer,” says Edwards.
People like big V8 engines. Not even necessarily for speed reasons, but they like the way they feel, the sound, the rumble, the sense of owning and using a powerful well engineered machine. A family friend of mine recently signed to buy a Z06 Corvette, which gets to 60 in under 3 seconds, but told me he never intends to drive it fast at all, he simple enjoys the sound and rumble of the bigger engine. Of course, modern pickups are about as fast as sporty cars of the past: a V8 F150 in 2025 gets to 60 in about the same amount of time as a V8 Mustang from 1995. They're not exactly slow, they cruise at highway speeds and pull out no problem.
People like big comfortable cars. They like having space to stretch out. They like having an excess of space for stuff, so they don't have to worry about how much they are carrying, or carefully clean and sort things each day.
People like having an excess of capability. Being able to haul things at any time, even if you don't need to often, is nice. Being able to haul way more than you need, is nice.
The reasons not to get one: it's difficult to park, it's bad on gas, stylistic reasons. Most suburbanites and rural dwellers never parallel park, and live in areas with abundant parking, so it doesn't matter to them. The increased gas cost of a pickup vs an SUV or full size van is pretty negligible. Gas might be annoyingly pricey, but it is factually cheap: the price difference between a 20mpg vehicle and a 30mpg vehicle is $600/10,000 miles, or about $6k over 100k miles, assuming an average of $3.50/gal. $6k is a pretty unimportant difference over the life of a car between one you like and one you don't, probably shouldn't make your decision for you. Stylistically, some people don't like them, some people do. The people who do, buy them.
Vehicle purchases are, at heart, irrational. Trucks are tough and fun and capable, and people dig being associated with that, in the same way that they seem to enjoy dressing up like their favorite sports stars and watching games, or putting on cowboy clothes on Halloween. I like to say that All Cars Are Drag, costumes that we put on and take off. And nowhere is this more relevant than with the Butch Drag offered by pickups. “When asked for attributes that are important to them,” Edwards says, “truck owners oversample in ones like: the ability to outperform others, to look good while driving, to present a tough image, to have their car act as extension of their personality, and to stand out in a crowd.” Trucks deliver on all of that. At a price.
I do think part of this discourse is poisoned by a weird belief in the anti-pickup truck crowd that if they see a truck without anything in the bed once or twice, it must never have anything in the bed. So I'd ask the crowd: how many times a year do you need to use your truck for truck things before you are "allowed" to own a truck?
Personally: I have a distaste for anyone who doesn't use the things they own. I have an American aristocratic horror of things that are "kept nice."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12d ago
Anabaptists are the future.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
I watched the interview, I care about the possible cost of a war with Iran.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
I enjoy the cocktail party version of this argument: the logical conclusion of the "potential persons" line is that men don't have the right to refuse consent to potentially fertile women. Women, of course, have a limited number of possible pregnancies and as such can maintain some right to choose their partners. But men are capable of impregnating at least once a day, so unless he's saving it for someone else when a man is offered sex by a potentially fertile woman he is obligated to accept, as otherwise he is destroying the potential for human life.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
Lots of cultures historically have had much more consensus on treating sex the way that traditionalists would prefer it were treated, including America in earlier eras...
I always feel like this is way oversimplified.
“There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the alter of monogamy” -- Arthur Schopenhauer
I highly doubt a traditional culture has ever existed where most high-agency (read: upper class, free, generally attractive and fit) men reached the alter after their teenage years as virgins.
Assuming it were possible to settle such a bet, I would put considerable money down that no King of France ever reached his wedding night a virgin other than Louis XVI, and we know how that turned out.
Really, it's probably worse than that: if I asked the many Louis' and Francois' if they were virgins when they got married, they'd be confused by the question. "What do you mean virgin, I'm a man you fucking idiot?"
What we're dealing with is a result of a culture built around equality, of the classes and the sexes, and the results of that culture.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
Ted Cruz didn't go on Tucker for a chat, he went on Tucker to convince the American people (ME) of the correctness of his views. Ted Cruz is advocating for a position.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
Cruz also thinks that the Bible requires Christians to support the nation of Israel, which is somewhat non-mainstream in theology: "Where does my support for Israel come from, number 1 we're biblically commanded to support Israel". Tucker tries to ask 'do you mean the government of Israel' and Cruz says the nation of Israel, as if to say it's common-sense that the nation of Israel as referred to in the Bible is the same as the state of Israel today. It seems like he's purposely conflating the dual meanings of nation as ethnic group and nation as state, which is a stupid part of English.
Also Cruz said to Tucker "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States”. How would this help in the context of a hostile interview, does he think that's a helpful thing to say? I can only imagine that Cruz thinks this is a winning issue, he wants to play hard rather than go down the wishy-washy 'Judeo-Christian' values route. Is declaring your devotion to a foreign country really that popular in America?
I have so many layers of problems with this logic. Even starting by accepting that "the bible tells me so" is a good way to set up foreign policy, let's take a second and think through a few implications:
a) What kind of arrogant or ignorant person thinks that the verse can be interpreted simply and literally?
Ted Cruz says that in Genesis (well, he didn't know that, but that's where it is) God commands us to bless and aid Israel. But much of the Old Testament consists of God punishing Israel, often with foreign invasion and raiding. God is constantly using foreigners as a tool to punish Israel, especially when Israel is lead by a corrupt, selfish, venal, dishonest, cruel man who refuses to give up power at the appointed time. God seems to cause Israel to lose as often he causes them to win, to be honest as a genre-savvy gentile if I were living in Old-Testament-Superstition-Land, I'd probably stay out of it. God, to my knowledge, never punished anyone for ignoring Israel. God's blessing to Israel is as often the blessing of discipline as it is the blessing of good things, and I sure wouldn't want to get between the Father and the child he intends on spanking. Getting involved with how exactly God is seeking to bless Israel seems like a real Oracle of Delphi situation!
In fact, the one clear example where God blesses an outside nation for its aid of Israel would be...Cyrus the Great of Persia. So perhaps we can intuit that the Persians are a nation specially chosen of God to chastise and discipline Israel? It seems odd that Ted Cruz is so certain he knows God's will. But let's accept for the moment that we are obligated to help Israel:
b) Which Israel?
Is Israel its government? Is Israel the global diaspora of Jews? Is Israel the population within the borders of Israel, regardless of religion, provided they descend from Abraham? This might seem like trivia, but I'm pretty sure the verse that Ted Cruz is citing is Genesis 12:3 which reads in the ESV:
I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Which of course brings up the question: Who the fuck is you? Frequently this is interpreted, and put up on billboards by Israel lobbyists, as "blessing Israel." (Where's your Sola Scriptura, Ted?) But God makes no mention of a state or government. The more natural interpretation of the phrase (leaving aside the new covenant that "you" is the Church, which is pretty obviously correct and righteous to me) would be all the descendants of Abraham are to be blessed. I would certainly offer no privilege to Abraham's descendants who have persisted in one type of religious error over another.
But let's accept that the state of Israel, as represented by its government, is what is to be blessed, let's consider:
c) Is it blessing someone to help them commit a sin?
Some years ago I was the best man in a very relgious Evangelical wedding. Before the ceremony, the pastor gathered up all the groomsmen, and we prayed and we put our hands on the groom, and the pastor told us that our obligation was not finished when he said I Do or when the tables were cleared up, that we had taken on an ongoing sacred obligation, to bless our friend, to bless his union, to come to his aid to keep his marriage together and to keep him on the straight and narrow. I said Amen.
Today, he called me, and told me that his wife is cheating on him, that he knows where she is the guy she is there with, that he's coming to my house because he needs a gun today so he can go kill them both.
Does my sacred vow to help him and bless him obligate me to give him the gun? Am I violating my oath if I ask him any questions other than "what caliber?" Ted Cruz would seem to say yes, you are obligated to bless him and that means helping him do whatever it is he wants to do. Ted would probably say "Do you need a ride?"
I would say that's an insane interpretation or friendship, and an even more insane interpretation of blessing. I would say that my obligation in this scenario is to restrain my friend, by physical force if necessary, to prevent him from committing a horrible life-ruining and soul-damning sin. I would say that my obligation extends so far as to warn his wife, to call our mutual friends and his pastor to help me talk him down, or even if no other means were available to call the police, to prevent him from committing murder. Friendship means protecting your friends, and that includes protecting them from committing mortal sins.
In my life, when I've had a friend who was in a really bad place, I've gone to his house with a bunch of friends and told him hey let me take your guns to store them for a few months, to keep you from doing anything you might not live to regret. That is what I think friendship is.
But ok, let's say I do give him the gun, that still doesn't answer...
d) Is it blessing someone to help them make a mistake?
Let's alter the hypothetical above: accepting ad arguendo that I am obligated to give my friend a gun to kill the man that cuckolded him and his cheating wife, what if my friend's wife cheated on him with JD Vance, and my friend has no realistic chance of taking my 1911 and getting past the Secret Service (ok that may be easier than previously thought...) and killing Vance. Am I still obligated to give him the gun?
This is where knowing the population of Iran is a useful piece of information. At least within an order of magnitude! It allows you to faithfully discharge your obligation to Bless Israel with, for example, wise counsel! If what Israel needs is advice, it doesn't help them to give them weapons to help them get themselves into trouble.
I just don't see how evangelical politicians can act like the bible command leads directly and easily to using bunker busters on Iran.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
Yes, this is accurate. None of the things you think matter I think matter. I can go to the restaurant dressed however I please, and I don't care if the meal is especially tasty or not. I just want to get some food.
If none of those things matter to you, I don't want to go out to eat with you.
If you pick the restaurant, you're liable to pick a $200 a plate sushi restaurant when I said I wanted a quick snack; or take me somewhere that's absolute shit and say "I don't care if the meal is especially tasty." If I try to take you out to nice dinner to celebrate a friend's birthday, you're liable to show up in gym shorts and a wifebeater and say "I can dress how I please."
Similarly, if Ted Cruz doesn't care about the size of a country he wants me to go to war with, I will ignore Ted Cruz' opinion on who we should go to war with. If Ted Cruz wants to personally go to war with Iran, that's his call, but I'd prefer he not drag me and my country with him.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
Knowing the specific population of Iran is far, far less relevant than knowing it’s a Shia theocracy implacably opposed to Israël and pushing Shiite interests in the Middle East.
Why not both? Is that really so much to ask?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
Something's gotta give between
-
Abstinence until marriage
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Marriage driven by choice and random chance relatively (25+) late in life.
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No fault divorce.
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A healthy sex drive in an individual.
I'm not accusing you of hypocrisy, I think I know what you'd choose. But at core those four can't, in general, live together. At least one has to go.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
I think it goes way deeper than that. The concept of declaring war and making peace within European (and hence today, global) diplomatic systems goes back to Rome at least. The Romans had huge amounts of superstitions and traditions related to declaring war, and making peace. Numa Pompilius, who first held the title Pontifex Maximus which has gone in unbroken succession to our current Pope Leo, introduced the tradition of the Temple of Janus to the Roman populace in order to tame their warlike urges. The temple's gates were open in times of war, and closed in times of peace. The formal declaration of war and peace was a superstitious, religious matter for the Romans.
When we abandon that kind of simple logic, we chip away at an organized international legal system, and we wind up with a permanent murky state of conflict. If you never have declared war, you can never have peace.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
Like church, most people don't attend regularly. They just go to the holiday services (pride).
But as with certain varieties of Buddhism, most people will spend a period in a monastery (university) where they will engage in serious study and pious indoctrination.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
I don't think we really have two different approaches. Your snatch goal is your goal, and you have to work through or around injuries to get to that. Right now, fitness wise, BJJ is my goal; everything else is an assistance exercise. I gut through soreness/injury for BJJ, but not for everything else where it might impact rolling every day I can.
The accountability mechanism right now for BJJ is very effective, I have several close friends who are about as good as I am at my gym and I can't let them get better than me and leave me behind, because right now our technique progress is huge month to month. Compared to that everything else is less important.
But at the same time, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm six or seven months into jiu jitsu as my main focus now, and it's important to keep up lifting and cardio, if only to avoid getting weaker. So I'm trying to figure it out.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
Been a while since I've dealt with an LDR, but some simple mechanical advice:
As a man, you probably only contact people when you have something to say to them, and typically only when you need something from them. You aren't contacting her just to chat and show general affection, you're contacting her to solve a problem (often one that rhymes with "she wants me to call her") or when you're horny or to organize something.
Your goal in an LDR is to tie her into your life, show her you are thinking about her, so that she doesn't feel so far away.
Send her pics of your day. Not necessarily selfies of you, but just of funny advertisements, pretty wildflowers, or traffic jams, or your workout equipment, or the sky, or a screenshot of your phone when a song is playing that "reminds you of her." She's the person you want to share these things with, and when you see them she's the person you think of, and you wish she was there.
Send her articles you read that you think she might be interested in, then discuss them. Ideally, she's interested in the same articles you would be reading anyway, but we can't all be so lucky, so be prepared to invest a little time finding articles she will like. "Hey, I saw this, what's your take?" Then throw in some lovey dovey before/after along the lines of "I'm so happy I have you, there's no one else I trust/believe/is smart enough/gets it/shares my values who I can talk about this with." Makes her feel valued, and brings you closer.
Utilize the work of others. You have trouble doing expressions of affection, but luckily there's a huge industrial complex online of people producing sappy content. There's an effectively infinite quantity of content on twitter (and probably other places) that's a picture of two cute animals, or an historical painting, or hell of two literal spoons, with the caption "us if we were..." She will like that.
Good luck my friend.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
But man, it sucks getting old.
Dude, I sympathize, it feels like a constant flow of minor injuries all of a sudden. I've had trouble sticking to a workout program outside BJJ this whole year, because of near constant minor injuries leading me to abandon each exercise plan/challenge in turn. Start working squats; lower back injury. Start working kettlebells; trap injury. Start running; knees are bothering me. Get on the rower; elbows. I know I'll get a lot out of adding supplemental work to BJJ, but I can't seem to stick with anything at all.
So sorry to hear about your cousin. It's so sad when you see someone whose life is essentially tragic.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
Something I think hasn't been addressed thus far: the degradation of international law over the GWOT period, leading to the current Iran-Israel conflict. War used to be declared publicly, fought to a conclusion, ended with finality. Now there isn't really a declaration of war, states of conflict exist in nebulous ways between strong-state, non-state, and weak-state actors. Obviously this goes back a long way, but the US pioneered this process during the GWOT, asserting its right to bomb within certain countries at any time, with no declaration of war, and no peace made afterward. The USA was never at war with Pakistan, and Pakistan never formally publicly approved the use of force by the USA within Pakistan's borders in either a narrow operation or broader war. Yet the USA continuously bombed targets in Pakistan, and even launched a commando raid within Pakistan's borders killing residents of Pakistan with no formal notice to or approval by Pakistani authorities. The USA continuously asserted its right to bomb targets in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, without a formal declaration of hostilities commencing or ceasing.
What was initially the prerogative of the hegemon leaked. Israel and Iran started to assert their right to do the same after terrorist attacks, first within weak states and targeting non-state actors. Israel periodically bombs targets in Lebanon, Syria. Iran responded to attacks by bombing non-state targets in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan. Now they're trying to assert that right to bomb each other. Now we're in a situation where the belligerents escalated from proxies, to hurling drones and missiles at each other, with no particular realistic end point in sight.
What we're seeing is a kind of low-grade warfare, that will drag on, because it forms political positive feedback loops. The leaders who send the bombs are strengthened by the bombs that come in reply. Peace is an unclear process from here.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19d ago
If you're trying to put more detail into defusing and avoiding the conversation while seeming normal, for nearly every sport you can nearly always say something along the lines of "I used to LOVE it when I was a kid, but nowadays I just can't stand the [foreign or billionaire money/social media/diva players/lack of loyalty/lost spirit of the gameall of the above] so I don't really watch it like I used to." The purity play will actually position you as more of a football fan than your interlocutor: you love the real game not the spectacle of today, like refusing to go to a novus ordo mass positions you as more Catholic than the pope.
If you're trying to fake actually watching sports for networking or social purposes, I recommend the SbNation network of blogs, they do all the American sports and most of the big European teams. Each blog is independent, run by fans, but in general they're pretty decent in quality. Arsenal is here, I can't certify quality as they're all fan-run and the blog varies by team. I follow the SbNation blogs of the teams I follow pretty religiously, and they will both give daily/weekly news summaries and game recaps, that will take you five or ten minutes to follow daily and fifteen or twenty to summarize weekly. With that knowledge, you can hang in a conversation with any fan for as long as they want to talk.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19d ago
Short answer: No. Neither Iran nor its allies can do fatal damage to Israel, Israel can sustain air operations against Iran for a period of time, then things will cool off for a while. Iran's regime is not going to fall, at least not in a way salutary to Israel, but neither is Israel's going to fall, at least not in a way that achieves Iran's goals.
Long answer: it depends on the timescale and how you define "Israel."
The dreams of "modern" "western" "tech hub" Israel have suffered, and may in the short term become impossible, as a result of this conflict. I don't know that a modern tech economy can survive in a place that suffers missile attacks with regularity. And it's not clear where the off-ramp from here that leads to normalization of Israel's situation sits anymore. It's highly likely that Israel will face significant difficulties de-escalating on a permanent basis.
The goals of Netanyahu and his allies have been advanced, in that Bibi has another simmering conflict to stoke to remain in power.
The long term future of Israel probably ticks downward, but hey maybe AGI or whatever.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20d ago
Much simpler to just use weight categories and set them in 10mph tiers.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21d ago
Because the Cybertruck speed limit would be 1/10 the speed limit for a Honda goldwing assuming equal momentum limits.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21d ago
I don't really care because they've got skin in the game in the most literal way possible.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22d ago
I've always wanted to watch a drunk driving track race. Every pit stop involves pounding a couple shots.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22d ago
Yes, and when Obama was elected he kept Dubya's SecDef along with most of his top generals, and after Obama we had two straight Dem nominees who voted for the Iraq war in the Senate. We did not see politicians who supported the war suffer consequences en masse.
I pray that it is real.
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