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
4hr ago
We had a Palestinian restaurant here that really went all in on the politics. They went out of business, probably didn't help but mostly the service was truly horrendous, like the dumbest kids at the mosque got waiter jobs there.
I kind of appreciate it, but I also wouldn't care about going to a Jewish deli that had Israeli flags everywhere. I like places where the owners feel free to express themselves personally.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
The US suffers from being stalled in expectations. We will make the group stage, we will not win more than one game in them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5hr ago
I don't think Israel has hurt their image to that extent. They've hurt it significantly, but not that badly.
The image of Jews who look sound and act like Europeans or Americans being pushed out of their homes would not be politically survivable.
As soon as Trump turns on Israel the Democrats will have the Jews back in their good graces.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
I don't think one can pretend there's no difference between what Dubya did, which I protested at the time!, and what Trump is doing.
When Dubya or Obama gave circuitous and diplomatically phrased lies in press releases or statements by some underling, there was still some idea that if the President spoke directly and said it like he meant it, everyone would know we were serious.
If Obama had given a direct personal statement saying that we were going to blow some little country to hell if they didn't do what we wanted, everyone would have considered it a very serious situation. Trump now does that regularly. That possibility that there is a mode of communication that would be more serious or more credible no longer exists.
There is no way to signal seriousness or credibility anymore.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
That was a literal reference I was thinking of when I said it.
Obama set a red line, and then hemmed and hawed about whether it was crossed and what the consequences would be, and as a result we sent so much crap to Syrian rebels that it sparked Chinese manufacturers to create knockoffs of the fanny packs that were issued by the CIA to sell to other Syrians who wanted to imitate the style. And we're still talking about it today.
Trump does the same thing over and over until we don't even bother talking about it on this forum anymore.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
I've been critical of Israeli policy before, but that kind of disagreement hides a fundamental similarity: Israel is us. They live like us, they act like us, they mostly look like us.
The image of Jewish people being purged from their homes as a result of US foreign policy mismanagement would be incredibly destructive.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
(Obviously sample size of 1 doesn't say much about anything, but from my perspective, football watching has seemed more sticky in a marketing sense than the other sports, idk).
I think Football is more of a social event than the other sports for most people, and as social connections have gotten more attenuated and the list of acceptable small-talk topics has shrunk, the NFL has taken on a greater meaning for a lot of people. It's doing work that casual discussions about things that didn't used to be risky or politically charged used to carry the burden for. Being Birds fan is a bigger part of my personality now than it was in college, because "Go Birds" is an easy way to chat with a wide variety of people in my life now. I can talk with my wife's ob-gyn and with my roofer about the AJ Brown trade quite easily.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
The Israeli conflicts are a trap for American presidents because they don't want either side to win or to lose. Israel losing a war would destroy Trump's presidency irrevocably.
Are we still doing this? Which is it, 39th time? Are Pakistanis fabricating this again? I understand that Trump really, really wants a deal with Iran, he is generally an enjoyer of Deals (wrote a whole book on that, I recall) and more immediately there's the issue of midterms. But Trump has kept announcing this deal, and every damn time it fell through, sometimes with Iranians flat out denying that they even were in contact with the US. I am skeptical about this one too.
It's a funny meta-situation that all weekend I saw the deal announcement in the news, and thought it was notable that there was no post about it in the CWR, but at the same time I couldn't come up with anything all that creative to say beyond "here we go again.jpeg"
I think it's notable that Trump has so reduced the credibility of statements of foreign policy from POTUS to the point where we all agree collectively that they aren't worth discussion. It's impossible to imagine a world where Obama or Dubya or Clinton made these kinds of empty threats and promises that went nowhere at all. "Bush Lied, People Died" was a popular protest T Shirt in the oughts; "Trump Lies, nothing in particular happens" would be the modern equivalent. Presidents lied to us throughout my life, obviously, but the lies were things like "we are building a strong stable Afghan democracy" which were backed up by significant action and time wasting. The statement is untrue, but its implications cannot be ignored. The
At the same time, I'm being assured by Top Men in the plan truster crowd that the whole deal is a feint and Trump is actually planning to continue the war. Which makes me unspeakably sad as an American. We used to understand why December 7th was a day which will live in infamy, now we brag about doing worse.
I don't think it's good that the US government, directly through the president and cabinet secretaries and not through a sacrificial undersecretary of yadayadayada, regularly lies to us about what's going on. I'm starting to get very tinfoil hat about the various looney tunes accidents that are supposed to have occurred during the Iran operation. I just don't come anywhere close to believing things said directly by the president, SecState, SecWar; even directionally or legally they aren't anywhere close to true.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
There seems to be some kind of psychological law that everyone believes that their out-group is uniquely cowardly and can easily be cowed and persuaded by terroristic aerial bombing campaigns, despite the knowledge that one's in-group would absolutely never be persuaded by such means.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
Reasonable seems like an odd phrasing.
Can you live your life that way and survive? Yes, obviously.
Will you miss out on many things? Yes, obviously.
I think the big question to ask yourself is are you comfortable with coming back to interpersonal relationships in ten years and being in a profoundly weird position of trying to play catch-up?
High achieving gunners often experience this after college, they focused on academics throughout high school and College, and now they've achieved their early professional goals and it is time for romance, but they missed the developmental steps along the way, so they're stumbling through first dates and first kisses at 24, and lack the training and reference that their peers have around these things.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't believe it's the case that we're seeing a significant shift in fandom between sports as a result of phone introduction, which we would expect if the modern attention span drove changes in which sports were more amenable to fandom.
I've been seeing these "just-so" stories forever about why X sport is superior to or expanding past Y sport, and for the most part things haven't changed that much from when I was a kid. I've no doubt phone consumption is way way way up, but we're not seeing a concomitantly massive change in sports consumption.
Which sport you find interesting and engaging seems to be mostly downstream of what you grew up with, with the possibility of conversion as an adult being unusual but not unheard of. The parallel is closer to religion than it is to anything else.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
This isn't exactly the answer to your question, but in high school our family business did a large renovation job at a local university, and afterward there was a fairly simple maintenance job that required periodic observation for 10 hours a day seven days a week but only a few hours of actual activity. Because it was a university job, it was "prevailing wage" meaning laborers were paid full union wages, which iirc at the time was $32/hr for this field, including overtime it was a few grand a week for this low-work low-skill job.
So because my dad didn't want to pay a real employee that much money for no real work, I spent most of the summer hanging out on campus, making absurd money (some of which I was even actually paid!), and in between morning and afternoon and evening rounds that took up about half the day, I wandered around the academic libraries and just took books off shelves and read all day. If anyone wondered who I was they never asked, I was just a sort of sixteen year old academic hermit in work boots. I worked a lot of hours but I spend all of it reading, and it didn't matter that I had no weekends because I just spent all night running around with my friends anyway.
I often say if I could have kept that weird little job forever, I never would have even gone to a real college. I got everything I wanted out of life right there.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Hence the ever more extreme distances of Yuppie office worker distance running. The same awe that used to attach to the Marathoner is now reserved for the Ultramarathoner. Soon it will be for the Barkley marathons, I suppose.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
A lot of people age out of playing their ball sport of choice as a function of being rejected to continue progressing up the ranks
Absolutely, this is a good insight. I stopped playing baseball and basketball when I missed the high school teams. Continuing to play at 16 while not being on the high school team would have been unbearably lame to me, but taking up boxing had no similar feeling of being obviously worse than the guys in my school who were on the basketball team.
The American ball sports also suffer particularly from the physical differentiation in positions, the implications change when the talent pool gets bigger. In 4th grade I was a center, in 7th I was a power forward, by high school I was the right size to play small forward, if I had been good enough to make it to college ball I would be too short to be an undersized point guard.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
they are just less legible and it is a problem because the most popular American sports are focused on the score.
The score is the point. Keeping score is what separates a sporting event from a dance. To quote one of my favorite philosophical quotes about Soccer from Sampaoli:
One night, I went to a bar, I was with a woman. We talked all night. We laughed, we flirted, I paid for several drinks of hers. At around 5am, a guy came in, grabbed her by the arm and took her to the bathroom. He made love to her and she left with him. That doesn't matter, because I had most of the possession on that night.
All the stuff that isn't scoring fundamentally doesn't matter to the outcome of the game. Those actions that don't lead to scoring could have mattered, the omission of them might have mattered, but ultimately they didn't matter. They might matter inasmuch as they are part of a longer process which leads to actual scoring, but if they don't lead to anything then it didn't matter.
I think Baseball is most instructive - it is also often a very low scoring game like Soccer.
This is kinda silly. The average baseball scoreline is 4.5-4.5 basically forever, the average scoreline in the Big 5 UEFA leagues is 1.4-1.4. So baseball features three times the scoring of top flight soccer.
But anyway, my point isn't that soccer is boring, I quite like it, I intend to get quite drunk at the local brewery for as many of the USMNT games as possible. I want to cheer on our boy from Herhsey and a bunch of the most accidental Americans imaginable.
It's just that I think Soccer fans who talk shit on American sports are stupid and ignorant.
It's the same bullshit when soccer fans complain about commercial breaks in American sports, while buying soccer jerseys that are walking advertisements.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I am not sure if I would go to a NBA game if I were offered floor seats for free.
You should, if you get the chance. I've had floor seats from a friend for some truly awful Sixers' teams, and it was still a fantastic experience to see them that close.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Oh it was great. It probably helped that I smuggled in a bottle to pass around, but we were all good friends by the final whistle.
But my philly friends were picturing the way that opposing fans get treated at the Linc. One year my dad gave his season tickets at the Vet to a friend who was a Cowboys fan early in the season who went in Cowboys gear, the rest of the year when we went to the games people threw stuff at US because they thought WE were Cowboys fans, even though we were cheering for the Birds.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
That said, the NBA is still about winning.
Winning a Championship, and nothing else matters. Which leads to a bad regular season product, because the regular season isn't set up to really reward winning in the regular season with better odds to win the championship.
Height matters but not to the same extent. Big men are only valuable if they can also hit a three. Mr. Process himself is not a bad three point shot, and Wemby at 7-4 shoots threes like he is Reggie Miller.
I think it's just obvious that it's easier to shoot 3s when you're taller. There's no other way to make sense of Joel Embiid being a good three point shooter.
Basketball as a sport is great. Pickup games can be fun even with a range of talent. It doesn't take an entire field like soccer or football. Half-court games mean 20 players can simultaneously play on a single court.
It's probably the best sport that can be played at any number of people. 1 on 1, 2 on 2, 3 on 3 all work. Though to be honest, as a kid we came up with indoor 1v1 baseball rules. It's just a matter of creativity and determination.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
It was meant to be addressed to
Knicks fans say[ing] that Taylor Swift doing a little dance on the sideline is performative...
I apologize if that was unclear. I take no position on your personal fandom, just on the question of whether it is legitimate to complain about celebrities sitting on celebrity row.
For what it's worth, the Knicks themselves seem to have no problem with Timmy and were chanting Lisan Al Ghaib at him while spraying him with champagne after the game.
I am not a NBA fan. I watched 3 games all year which were these finals despite still playing basketball a few times a week.
That is for the most part what NBA fandom is. The regular season is increasingly pointless and ignored, the playoffs make up a whole second season, and there are just too many games to pay attention to. I probably watched the end of a dozen Sixers games this season after my wife went to bed, and most of their playoff games. Compare: I watch essentially every Eagles game, I watch or listen to dozens of Yankees and Phillies games during the season.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I don't think it's weird or unusual. Unathletic adult men gathering for sports is like 95% of my social life. But as upper middle class white folks, we have to invent new sports in order to be any good at them, because if we go down to the Y to play pickup basketball we're getting mogged by the inner city. Hence my lifetime devotion to crossfit, rowing, rock climbing, Brazilian jiu jitsu, and other dumb and obscure pastimes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The debate is impossible.
Soccer fans claim the sport has more action because the ball is constantly in play. Non-soccer fans claim it is boring because there is little danger of anyone doing anything important for the vast majority of that time.
Soccer fans claim that baseball is boring because the ball is in play very little. Baseball fans feel it is exciting because every single pitch can result in a score.
Hockey and fight sports probably have the best balance of constant action with meaningful scoring at any second, but both are somewhat niche and require some degree of specialist knowledge to properly understand.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
This is the strangest statement I've ever heard. Screaming and booing and chanting at games is white culture.
I predict that if the USMNT has an all time run (for them) with the world's most accidental American, birthright citizenship will be upheld. The man is scoring goals for the national team because his mother was refused air transport home because she was too pregnant with him at the time. This wasn't even birth tourism: they just didn't want her giving birth over the Atlantic.
If they embarass themselves, birthright citizenship will be rescinded.
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