FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
You know, I tried the same thing for regular catholic lent, and found that it was so easy it wasn't worth doing. Beyond mildly aiding with a touch of weight loss, I didn't notice much of anything.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
As noted by others, in studies date-rape drugs are exceedingly rare. People vastly overestimate how consistent their drink-tolerance is, it depends on so many factors that people aren't tracking like food intake, hydration, sleep, stress. And, personally, alcohol tends to make me want more alcohol and other intoxicants, so that it's like driving on an icy road: it's not a problem to get going but it's a problem to stop. Most reported roofies are likely to be alcohol induced, or other recreational drugs taken willingly while drunk.
But, it should be noted that the Mickey Finn cocktail or "angel dusting" a joint for purposes of robbery is pretty well attested, so it's not totally beyond belief. But it's more likely in a seedy saloon than a frat house.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Jane Austen would understand, to the point where "Elizabeth Bennet rushes Bama" is a crossover fic I would consider reading.
That is something we need.
The hypocrisy is exactly the sort of thing that Dalrock used to talk about on his blog, and which leads to the standard Blue joke about Red Tribers marrying early and often have a point. Dalrock's thesis was that American meritocratic elites had a sexual morality where sex and marriage were separated - when seeking sex you do whatever it takes to compete for attention from the top 20% SMV guys, but when seeking marriage you should be as practical as a Jane Austen character. In this model both tribes have the same sexual morality, but the Blue Tribe are more honest about what they are doing.
Do you have a link to a blog post?
There are strong vibes of high-status sorority sisters (upperclasswomen, chapter officers, big-name legacies) pimping out lower-status girls (underclasswomen, girls from lower-middle-class families) at their own sororities to the frats in order to build useful social connections.
I wondered about that, to what extent that is its own hierarchy, but all I had was speculation and anecdote, no evidence. It was more observable in high school than college for me, but I didn't go to school in the south.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Of course, an open question (to many, anyway) is how many of their parents have college degrees. Wouldn't be super surprised if a fair share of dads were never in a frat because they are sitting on half a million dollars they made doing lawn care or HVAC contracting or something that doesn't require a college degree since they graduated high school.
As cited variously, a significant fraction of these girls come from families that have deep roots in the sorority/fraternity system. If not her own parents, an aunt or a friend of the family is writing the recommendations.
Those are the people I'm most interested in. It's not everyone, but a large enough number that they represent a legible group, who must therefore hold values by which it makes logical sense to send their daughter to the sorority. They must have some, if only inchoate, idea of why they do it and how it benefits them.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Especially if the fathers of would-be sorority-girl daughters are disproportionately likely to be former frat guys themselves. Sometimes I wonder if having a daughter causes a man to develop retrograde amnesia of all the fatherless things he’s witnessed teenage girls and young women do as a teenaged boy and young man, otherwise the cosmic horror and existential dread would be overwhelming.
Yet it's a constant theme of country music, like Cleaning This Gun, linked above. These men are highly aware of this! And, of course, there are arguably better options in the college education game: Messiah, Wheaton, Liberty, etc.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Dammit. Every time I want to take a break from motteposting, something interesting and topical rears up.
I bask in your praise. Stay tuned for part II, tomorrow, which is the coverage of Race in the series.
You may be right, the purpose of private nominally secret societies may be that one can maintain a veneer of respectability outwardly while behaving badly in private.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Does that mean that when you put on your tie and cufflinks, you're doing so "self-consciously"?
Yes, in a sense. I'm very self conscious when putting on a tie, these days, that I'm dressing like a different person, and putting on that persona as part of the act.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
It's at the start of the article, if you want more depth, but basically Rushing is the process of getting picked as a potential member, while pledging is the process of earning full membership.
Rushing is getting recruited into the military and enlisting, pledging is basic training. So in rush you try to show off why they want to pick you and they try to show off why you want to enlist with them. Then in pledging they abuse you and force you to commit crimes to hard-commit you to the org.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Pretty much like that. Greek life is a minority, even at UA which is sort of the iconic frat school these days it's 36% of students.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
What does an Alabama Sorority Sister Consider an Ordered Sexuality?
My wife recently got into Substack and sent me this series covering Alabama Greek Life, particularly the famous #RushTok phenomenon of girls at the University of Alabama on tiktok. My wife followed #rushtok for a while, it’s a popular story among women. The substack piece is great, I highly recommend the whole series for a view of things we, uh, don’t get around here. I'm probably putting together a whole-'nother top level post about the other major thread in the series later. Some highlights working towards a core question I'm left with:
What is Rush and RushTok?
I’m sure most people here are familiar with the concept of Rushing and Pledging a fraternity or sorority, I myself have a family tradition of pledging a frat freshman year and getting in and then quitting immediately because it sucks (or because the men in my family are congenitally weird). The University of Alabama is a school with a very high development and prominence of Greek Life in the classical sense, which has become a national symbol for a kind of throwback Greek Life nationally.
In short: Rushtok is a genre of TikTok videos that includes women who are going through rush (also known as PNMs, or Potential New Members) and videos made by the sorority members themselves. Rushtok first took off in 2020, which is why people refer to this iteration as “Season Three.” Since that first year, the organization that governs rush (Panhellenic, or Panhell) has issued guidelines on the type of videos that PNMs can make (#OOTDs, aka Outfits Of The Day, and commentary that says nothing about the houses themselves or their specific experiences with them).
Why do they want to do this, this sounds horrible? The first and most obvious reason — even to the women themselves — is social structure and friendship. A lot of them talk about their desire for “sisters” in their videos in ways that sound pretty hollow, but friendship is what they’re grasping for: a network of friends and community and a path forward through the maze of college. That’s why I was convinced to rush as a Greek-system-resistant freshman at a liberal arts college, and I’ve long heard the advice to undergraduates (particularly at big state schools) that joining the Greek system is your way to get “plugged in” at school (as opposed to finding yourself lonely and lost in a faraway dorm or apartment off-campus). Obviously there are SO MANY ways to get “plugged in” to college life, but the Greek system is the cheat code. Before school even starts, you have somewhere between 100 and 400 “friends,” or at least people who will do things with you, tell you where the parties are and what time you should show up to them — and orient you to the campus, class, help figure out study groups, have people who can talk to you about what professors to seek out or avoid, etc. etc.
My wife and her friends love it. You get this look into the cool girls, and they have this guide aspect to it, very The Official Preppy Handbook for Gen Z. There’s always been an appeal to media that offers a direct guide to how a subculture works. Especially a subculture it is easy to fantasize about; women fantasize about being the hot sorority girl the same way men will fantasize about joining the Rangers. There’s something fascinating about the social Hell Week of getting a bid, the same way there is a fascination to the Seals Hell Week workouts. If you want to get a bid from the good sororities, you wear these sneakers and you buy this bag and you do your hair like this, and you never say that. There’s an entire culture to it, and you can see the impact it has in fashion trends:
What do you need to fit in?
Like so many processes that determine social order, there are written and unwritten rules — and various means that people pass down the knowledge that make it easier to abide by both. The most obvious is a handy guide published by the university every year called “Greek Chic,” which walks girls through the intricate Rush process. The Table of Contents spans everything from “Summer Dos and Don’ts” to a day-by-day breakdown of how Rush unfolds.
The aspirational standards at BamaRush this year are pretty similar to what they’ve been for the last few years: white (we’ll get to that); tan; long, straightened hair with waves; thin; significant amounts of makeup; short dresses with overly feminine features (big ruffles, structured poof sleeves ); and extensive jewelry, including multiple bracelets and rings. The deviations from that norm (in size, in skin color, in dress choice, in hair texture) are so remarkable as to single the girls out for Tiktok stardom. See: the two ‘stars’ of this year’s rush, Bama Morgan and Bella Grace. Both are aspiring for the norm in different ways (Morgan straightening her hair, Bella Grace’s dresses) but can’t quite fit in (for reasons of personality and perceived class). They mirror what so many of us, particularly those of us many years distant from our 17 and 18-year-old selves, understand as the building blocks of a good person and good human: individuality, personality, kindness, and humor….instead of looks, body size, wealth. (More on Morgan and her rush experience below)
And for girls outside of Alabama, there are two primary resources: TikTok and The Pants Store. If you drive from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa, you’ll first encounter the Pants Store via a massive billboard. Originally the pants store sold, well, pants. Mostly men’s. But now it’s an Alabama institution, and it specializes in whatever the college kids want: Hokas, Yeti mini-coolers, and walls upon walls of whatever’s the “right” thing to wear for Rush that year. The manager at the Pants Store told me that so many girls from out of state would come in before Rush asking questions about what they should buy that the company decided to come up with a full-color cheat sheet to help them shop...this place is basically the “Rush uniform store” — lots of “ruffles and flouncy stuff and bright pink and bubblegum pastel colors and sparkles,” which is exactly what the sororities are looking for. (And relatively modest: another sorority member told me the best look is your absolute cutest dress you’d still wear to Easter Sunday)
“I feel like there are definitely Bama/Southern trends observed in Rushtok, but there are Gen-Z trends that get characterized as Bama/Southern because they are different from what millennials and older expect,” they told me. “The commentary skews towards characterizing certain shows of wealth as inherently southern when I can name six girls between DC, NYC, an MN that are wearing fake designer or Cartier bracelets right now. Things are happening on a different scale for sure, but so much of it is the consumerism inherent to growing up with a curated profile. Every girl I know is performing femininity or consciously Not Performing (which is to perform) on IG/Tiktok and — and Tumblr when we were younger still. Like I have been visible on some scale since I was 13 and I will continue to be so and so everyone who meets me can see who I was and who I am and who I will be, which leads to such unique image curation on social media culminating in very performative ‘I own this’ signaling item…..and then boom, Golden Gooses for the South.” (Golden Gooses, by the way, are shoes that are $600-900+ and look like purposefully dirtied up Converse — and a current staple of RushTok)
I’ve seen the Golden Goose store at the KoP mall, and holy shit I felt old finding out those were a trend for rich sorority girls, and watching the storefront crawl with ABG shoppers coming out with bags of multiple pairs. What the fuck man? They look like converse purchased by some artsy middle schooler and painted with Sharpies for fun. It’s a pure Veblen good. Obviously it indicates that you’re spending Daddy’s money to fit in, that being one of the prime values of any Sorority...
While lots of people who attend the University of Alabama don’t come from money, most people in the Greek System do — some from regular upper middle-class money, some come from “American Gentry”-style small town families (think: Dad owns the biggest car dealer) and some come from the Chicago suburbs, Orange County, and New Jersey. One day on Greek Row I counted at least eight Jeep Wranglers just from where I was standing. One student told me the real car of choice amongst the Zetas is the Mercedes Benz G Wagon, which run upwards of $140,000. Driving those cars doesn’t necessarily mean you’re filthy rich, but it does mean you want to convey a certain level of wealth.
Kylan came to Bama for the same reason so many beauty queens do: because they match pageant scholarship dollars, and over her decade plus of competing in pageants, Kylan had amassed a sizable fund. Alabama is one of the only major universities that offers this match, but it’s honestly a brilliant recruiting strategy. How do you get more traditionally beautiful, academically invested, proficient public speakers to come to your school? Recruit them where (many) of them gather: on the pageant circuit.
Can’t emphasize enough how smart it is to literally dedicate effort to recruiting professionally hot teenage girls to come to your school, in the process producing a viral online content farm, which recruits more students. Alabama is going to be a top university within a generation just by being less aggressively abnormal than the old Ivy adjacents. I’m always amazed that Jeep has never built a more practical Wrangler clone, like the old Jeepster, the Wrangler has been perpetually popular as an SUV that is also a fun convertible, but it has wildly bad ergonomics, handling, and efficiency as a result of building it for off-road chops that the majority of buyers don’t need. The styling and the convertible top could easily be put in a smaller, unibody-AWD, practical package for the mall crawler crowd, sold at a lower but still premium price, and clean up. Ok, you’ve piled your Sororstitute outfits into your Jeep Wrangler and arrive on campus, what next?
Trust the Process
On a very basic level: Alabama’s sorority Rush is broken into multiple rounds over nine (very long) days. At the end of each day, students rank the sororities they’ve seen, and the sororities rank the students. The next day, you spend time at the houses you picked that also picked you. The process is repeated after each round, getting more and more exclusive, with fewer and fewer people invited back. Once you’re out — meaning, you have no matches — you’re out, with no recourse and no do-overs. As a result, each of these nine days — and each interaction with each sorority girl at each of these houses — is crucial. Until finally, at the end of it all, if you’ve made it that far, you find out which (if any) sorority has offered you a “bid” to join.
In practice, that means that a whole bunch of prospective new members have “recommendations” written by the friend of a friend who works with their dad. They’re not recommendations so much as evidence of social capital: that your parents are connected to people who were in Greek organizations, which is to say, that they occupy a certain place within the social hierarchy. And if you didn’t grow up in one of those places, and realize that you have absolutely no idea how to play this game with all these unwritten rules, but you really, really still want to….well, then you hire a Rush consultant.
A consultant? To help your daughter get in? More of daddy’s money, but why on earth does daddy agree?
This a carefully planned process. The ignorant might not realize it, but the in crowd knows it. Before you arrive they know who you are and what they want from you. And this is where the Sorority vision of femininity becomes so interesting to me:
What is the Sorority view of Ordered Human Sexuality?
[K]now that by this point (if not before!) all your social media profiles should be totally scrubbed of anything even resembling “bad” behavior. No visible drunkenness, no red solo cups, no cigarettes, no super revealing outfits, no thirst traps, maybe not even any bikinis, depending on the sorority you’re looking for. Oh, and probably no political content — although a little Jesus never hurt. One woman told me that she’d be advised to scrub her Venmo. (And if you think that you can just set your profile to private, wrong again: active members will start friend requesting you… and screenshots of locked accounts circulate freely.)
Why do they call their dresses “cute little dresses? Diminutive is feminine — and also the opposite of sexy, which is not the image you’re trying to exude during rush. (There’s a bit of a virgin/whore dynamic going on — rush dresses are, in many ways, “church dresses,” which are a contrast to the “going out” dress you wear when interacting with fraternities and under the male gaze)
My understanding is that there are queer out women in a lot of the sororities at Bama, and, well, there’s a lot of gay sex in the fraternities. A cis-gendered femme queer person would theoretically do just fine in rush if they had a hetero-seeming social presence, since discussion of the three Bs (booze, bars, boys) is strictly forbidden (and, by extension, any discussion of romantic relationships). For instance, as a PNM (Potential New Member), it seemed like people were just randomly approaching her and starting conversations when she visited the houses. “Once I was on the other side,” she explained, “I realized how strategic this meeting of people was.” Strategic is an understatement here. It's maybe more like... a very precisely choreographed and potentially creepy performance. She was now judging strangers on whether or not they had some magical combination of Alpha Chi traits: A smart girl, a Christian girl, a pretty but not in a slutty way girl, a girl who gives back.
But not all of the other actives approached ratings the same way. One moment really stuck with her: a girl was dropped from Alpha Chi because of nude photos — which had almost certainly been leaked by an ex-boyfriend. “I remember being appalled by that,” Emie said. “To write off a teenage girl for sending a picture to someone she obviously trusted, who then shared it was so awful to me. And it was just common practice.”
So don’t be too slutty. You must be hot, but don’t be provocative. Traditional femininity, but you have to be sexy. Not too sexy though. And for gooness sake, you can't be sexually available, forget it then. But you have to be friendly to the right guys or you're useless to us, we need you to turn it on for them to preserve our status. Ok, we’ve got it down, but then later in the series when discussing fraternities we see:
Step three is attending a “swap” party with a sorority, where the super drunk pledges are paired with sorority pledges. “In some cases,” Luke said, “a pledge might be like implored” (not forced, Luke clarified for me, but implored) “to like slap a girl on the ass or motor boat her.” That amount of alcohol over such a short period of time is a disaster waiting to happen — for the guys, but also for the women. They’re not allowed to bring alcohol on sorority premises. But they, too, often join the Greek system for the party life, which means that they’re left trying to circumvent these rules, either by sneaking in liquor and taking a whole bunch of shots in quick succession before heading to an event. Or, in order to drink, they have to depend entirely on the fraternities to supply it. Which means that they’re drunk on guys’ home turf, in cavernous fraternity houses that are unfamiliar to them — spaces where the guys are treated like unaccountable monarchs. And if you’ve just done some shots before walking out the door, the effects are probably kicking in just as you arrive at the party.
And the girls report:
“Fraternity boys in general scared me,” said Emie Garrett, who we heard from back in the first article. Before attending her first fraternity party, Emie had it drilled into her: Never leave your drink with anybody. Watch the bartender make it. Emie says girls were taught to keep their hand over the top of their drinks at parties. Of course, a lot of this advice goes out the window once you show up to a party, a little tipsy, with a bunch of jacked dudes shouting at you to do shots. “I just had so many friends who were roofied by guys that they trusted,” Emie said. It never happened to her. But other girls told her about experiences where they blacked out on a night when they didn't drink much or woke up somewhere with no memory of getting there. They’d make excuses for the guys: I'm the one that went there. I’m the one that drank it or did whatever drugs. They’d brush it off, make a joke of it. Reporting it never even entered the conversation.
Most of the sorority women I spoke to voiced something similar. They’d sat in their houses and watched the presentations on how to report a sexual assault, and how to get someone out of a vulnerable situation — as if they were soldiers, readying for war. Then there were the meetings after the parties — the ones where Emie saw sisters get dragged into hearings over pictures they posted online where they looked too drunk or were too provocative. “It’s like female sexuality that they were policing,” she said. So many women have internalized the idea that if something happened at a fraternity house, it was their fault for putting themselves in the situation. And they knew — by watching others — what usually happened when you tried to speak out about it. And it was usually nothing but embarrassment and shame.
Now it should be noted here that while there’s a constant panic about college sexual assault, women who are in college are less likely to be sexually assaulted than women the same age who aren’t in college. This does not mean that sexual assault isn’t a problem, but it does mean that we need to question the degree of causation between the circumstances of colleges and frat parties and sexual assault. To some extent our panic over frat party assaults is classist: an assumption that the "good girls" shouldn't be subject to this kind of treatment.
But still, the questions rise in my mind. The core values of UA trad families that want to put their girls in a sorority are conservative in the Country Music sense of conservative, and one of the things you see over and over in country music is being terrified of your daughter’s sexuality. (The offensively, vomit-inducing, treacly modern version which I truly can’t stand on the radio) But these sororities are family traditions, and as everyone emphasizes over and over most of their families were involved with Alabama Greek Life. I’d expect most of them to agree with my father, who advised my sister that who she married would be the most important decision she ever made in her life. I’d expect an outwardly patriarchal organization like Alabama Greek Life to agree broadly that women will ultimately be going to UA as much for an MrS as a BA degree, and that the former is as or more important than the latter to a woman’s life. How does joining a sorority help the modal sorority achieve that goal in a fulfilling way? I strongly suspect that the moms and the executive board would say that the ideal Alpha Chi girl should be modest and chaste, meet a nice high quality guy (presumably in a top frat at UA), and marry him. Certainly shouldn’t be having sex outside of a “committed relationship” monogamously, certainly never hook up. But then the dissonance with the party attitude of the sororities, and their subservient role to the fraternities, which is a kind of deranged and degenerate form of patriarchy by which the highest quality women are treated the worst. Why is some Alabama dad paying thousands of dollars to a consultant to help his daughter get assaulted at a frat party?
So I would love to see an interview with the kinds of moms that are still involved in alumni orgs, that encourage their own daughters to join these orgs, or with the social chairs of the current Sororities, about what they view as the optimal romantic life of an Alpha Chi girl. And how is what they do helping the girls to achieve that? Because you look at all their public marketing, and then you look at what they do, and it doesn’t line up. It’s not like their moms or aunts went to school in 1908, even a mother who had her now-UA-frosh daughter at 30 would have herself been at UA in the mid-90s, hardly a time of strict morality. It’s not like the parents are under the impression that their girls are going to a Christian summer camp here.
Now possibly the blackpill answer is that the risk is inevitable, so it washes out. The baseline risk at a frat party isn’t any higher, and may be lower, than it would be if she didn’t join greek life, or even if she didn’t go to college or went to LIberty. So the other aspects and appeals of Greek Life are worth more in the balance. But nonetheless, Sororities and Frats are constantly cited as conservative, and self consciously present themselves as such. Why don’t they organize their lives in conservative ways? Certainly I’m not expecting college students to live as monks regardless of their outward commitments, but why aren’t those outward commitments more in line with their stated values? And maybe their stated values themselves are a reflection of a more nuanced view of morality they hold in an interior way. Maybe the sorority moms would say, hey, girls are gonna have fun, we’d rather they have fun with the “right” kind of guy and hope for the best, and the structure of the system will protect her as much as she can be protected.
I’m not sure what the answer is. But I’m curious to see an intelligent, sympathetic breakdown of how these people think. The series is interesting to me, but the author is ultimately too liberal-blinkered to ask the most interesting anthropology questions about what these people believe. What do these girls (and the families funding their project) seek out of the experience of being part of this social circle, in terms of what they themselves would say is the most important decision in their lives?
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Youtube can try blocking this actions.
And Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service.
This is the tension I don't get. If youtube is allowed to block your actions, then what is enshittifying about it?
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
I'd bet the success rate is higher than you think, because the Cubans can feed her accurate or seemingly accurate Scoops about Cuba.
An intelligence analyst isn't that different from a beat reporter. They're examining a pile of information from different sources and trying to write a report guessing at the truth.
So much like a Yankees blogger secretly handpicked by Brian Cashman could quickly rise to the top by "correctly" predicting roster moves, a Cuban intelligence analyst working for Cuba can repeatedly guess meaningless facts correctly, showing brilliance in intuitions from limited data because she already knows the answers.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Small scale debate question: did anyone else feel like Vance got a lot of makeup?
My wife and I agreed that he was showing serious intellectual horsepower, but I felt like he gave off strong evil vizier vibes.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Were they?
Most of the classical world held the declaration of war sacred. I'm less familiar with Islamic or Chinese law on the matter.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
It's fascinating to me how thoroughly we've moved from a world of declarations of war being a core concept of international law, to existing in a permanent state of war across huge portions of the globe.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Characteristic of Solon also was his regulation of attendance at public entertainments, for which his word was "parasitein." Those who attended too often were punished, as were those who attended too little. Solon thought the conduct of the first grasping; that of the second, contemptuous of the public interests. -- Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
“if you want tradition you have the traditions you have” can excuse any bad cultural practice.
And if everyone refuses to accept any traditions excepting those they deem perfect, there will be no traditions, and no common culture. To have traditions requires compromise, requires acceptance of what everyone will enjoy together rather than demanding specificity, that everyone cater to your tastes and opinions.
The NFL consciously marketed itself as tradition and TV football only started being popular around 1960.
I was born in 1991. My father likes football, my mother likes football, my maternal grandmother likes football, my maternal grandfather liked football, my paternal grandparents were Witnesses so a little off. "Tradition is the handing down of the flame and not the worshipping of ashes." Tradition is living tradition, it is my experience of my parents, my scoutmasters, the guys I grew up working with, and, yes, the old timers at Lee's Hoagie House in Cheltenham we would stop to buy a hoagie from on our way to catch an Eagles' game at the Vet. The Eagles are a living tradition within my family and my community.
The NFL does not unify culture because it is anti-cultural: it is a commercial spectacle that alienates you, whereas playing a game with your neighbors is better at community-formation.
Alienates who? Alienates the family I saw two Mondays ago, wearing their matching Section 105 season ticket holder hats? Alienates the guys hanging out in the parking lot, drinking and grilling together? Alienates my family, getting together at my mom's house to watch the game together?
“Philosophy has always been tied to sports” ignores that from the advent of Christianity until the 20th century, sports were not esteemed in Western culture. That’s a long time. That’s more than 1500 years of Western philosophy not being tied to sports. Plato’s character Socrates was written to be good at wrestling in order to draw the vain to philosophy, sure. And wrestling also isn’t a commercial spectator sport.
Fake and gay. Medieval Christianity esteemed the Tournament, the pas d'armes. Waterloo, one of the formative moments of European history, "was won on the playing fields of Eaton." Muscular Christianity originates around the mid 19th century.
And it wasn't Socrates, it was Plato himself, Plato was his wrestling nickname. Wrestling may not be a spectator sport anymore, but wrestling is a major portion of MMA which is.
And, once again, living tradition. I don't care about the 1500 years before my grandfather was born. That isn't a living tradition, it's no more relevant than gay space communist fantasies.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
It's fascinating that you can see the ancestral evolutionary relationship between Soccer, Rugby, and Gridiron forms of football. You can see how the rules have changed over time, one at a time, until the games are as different as bats and apes, but as you go back each change was only a small alteration.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
I agree with most of your points and disagree with the idea that the NFL is bad. At the end of the day, if you want to have traditions, you have the traditions you have. Mourning the loss of a unified culture? Want to RetVrn to family traditions? Want to see regional pride? Want to see masculinity, aggression, sacrifice for the team? The NFL is what you've got in 2024 in America. You can't build something else in any kind of time to replace it. For all its flaws, the NFL is America, and if you love America and try to hate the NFL, you're a man without a country, even if I mostly agree with Carlin that baseball is philosophically superior. There is no other sport that can take its place, and if you think that once you eliminate sports you can replace it with religion or philosophy...well, I don't even know how to address that objection. Philosophy and sport have always been tied together, especially the contact and combat sports.
Personally, I watched the Eagles a lot growing up, but really stopped caring much about it in my twenties for a variety of reasons. I've only really gotten back into it since returning to my home town, my mother loves football and we watch essentially every game together as a family. It all starts there. I can think another sport is superior, but I can't walk into wawa and chat about the America's Cup race or the pro-lacrosse league or even boxing anymore, but I can say "Go Birds" and get back a "Go Birds."
They're the same in structure: startups lose money on early sales and expansion to build market share at the expense of established rivals, then focus on profitability once they have market share. Customers perceive the rise in prices as a betrayal, because they became used to the lower prices.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
And in the hypothetical where I scan the ham twice and miss the prosciutto, or scan the cheap lightswitch ten times and throw the heavy duty switches in the bag, and they catch me, "Oh man, lucky you noticed! Long day at work, I screwed up, let me fix it quick." No one is getting arrested, no consequences.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
The Eagles aren't as bad as they looked Sunday, but the game also shows us who the team is: front runners who play well with a lead but scuffle under pressure.
This game was perfect Complimentary Football from the Bucs, and the opposite from the Eagles whatever that is. The Eagles came in without three out of their five best players, and losing three out of their three receivers who have caught anything this season. The offense had a chance if they could keep it on the ground, using Hurts and Barkley to set up a strong running game, hold the ball, keep the defense fresh, and force the Bucs to play from behind. The defense immediately gave up a touchdown in the opening seconds, and from there it spiraled. The offense was not going to have the juice to come back from behind, and in trying they had a few three and outs early. This put the defense on the field too long, and pretty quickly the Bucs put up a big lead. Throw in a few inexplicable special teams errors, and the game was out of reach fast.
Jalen Hurts is a quarterback who can play well, but won't elevate a bad team. He can't do what a Mahomes or a Rodgers has done with mediocre talent around him. The defense can play well, but can be exploited if it wears out.
Hopefully they come back from the bye week healthy, and figure it out against the Browns and the Giants. The division is still in reach, with the Redskins beatable and the Cowboys determinedly mediocre. This game set the expectations for the season: try to make the playoffs. Not a super bowl team.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Man, that game totally scrambled any attempt to have power rankings. This whole week, really. What team is left that we have confidence in? Who are the elite this year?
The Chiefs are number one as long as they're undefeated and have Mahomes, but Mahomes managed to injure his own.best remaining WR after a collision following an interception. It's like Kansas City is running an experiment to see how far they can push Mahomes before he can't carry them.
The Bills were looking good before the Ravens game. Now they're looking more like, well, the Bills: occasionally transcendent and occasionally unworkable.
The Niners are banged up and have scuffled. The Jets have looked bad, running hot and cold with old man Rodgers. The Vikings are looking talented, but do we really have faith in The Darnold? The Bucs have looked good against most teams but got blown out by the Broncos. The Packers have looked good but got beaten up by the Vikings and the Eagles, at least one of whom sucks.
Basically every team we think is good has lost to a team we know is bad. Parity, I guess, though I think when we imagine parity we tend to picture 32 competent teams that play tight well planned games against each other, rather than 32 incompetent teams that all play sloppy error-fests.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
It's actually probably important to know, in that repeated incest is what drives genetic problems, so if I were a child of incest and more likely to carry recessive mutations I'd have been certain to marry one of the African or Chinese foreign exchange students to get as far away as possible.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
1mo ago
Revealed preferences?
Are there statistics out there on how common brothels have been over time in the USA? It seems intuitive to me that it's become a less accepted part of life in the past decades.
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