Wednesday ORT: Free Men In Paris, Airplane Windows, Optimized Life, NH35 Drama

All subscribers welcome

Good morning, friends. I’m suffering through a rash of unsubscribes mostly brought on by today’s appearance on the MotoMan podcast, so let’s go ahead and turn the heat high enough to drive the rest of the casuals out of the kitchen. (I’m kidding about the last part. Please don’t leave me.) If you want a reason to stay, however, tomorrow we will do the long-awaited AI discussion for paid readers only.

Tolerating degeneracy is not a virtue, and it never will be

I think I’m a pretty good writer but today we are going to hear from three people who are expressing my sentiments better than I can, and the first is Brad Troemel. He’s responding to this also extraordinary statement by Mayor Zohran:

Quality of life has come to be seen as somehow a right-wing concern. Efficiency…has been taken on as a right-wing concern. Rooting out fraud and waste, a right-wing concern… If you are staring at an example of social disorder or social inefficiency, and the left refuses to explain either why it has happened or how they will fix it, then the right gets to point at someone in the immediate area and say, ‘That’s who did it.’

I mean… duh, right? But it took the willfully foreign actor son of a willfully foreign director mother to say it. Listen up, Team Blue: if everyone gets in line behind this, and acts accordingly, we will never have a Republican official above the rank of county dogcatcher in this country again. But it won’t happen, and Troemel explains why:

This is why radlibs, when they defend the decay of public space with their routine about how “you must be a baby who’s afraid of the big city,” are doing top-notch PR for the rentier class. Their message, accept lowered standards or you’re a racist, a coward, or both, shames people out of voicing even mild discomfort and strips them of hope for a clean street, a safe ride home, or a park where their kids can play, basic expectations in the richest country in the world now recast as luxuries only a Karen would demand.

So what do you do once you’ve been shamed into silence? You develop a survival-based stoicism toward the people screaming, shitting, masturbating, and threatening you on the subway: face blank, eyes forward, phone gripped, waiting for your stop. Turtling into your shell breeds a perverse pride in your capacity to absorb abuse, resting on a story about who gets attacked: the naive, the defiant, the proud, the ones who intervene or acknowledge what everyone else ignores. Your cunning, meek “street smarts” are the difference, so they deserve it and you don’t. The alternative, that violence against commuters is random, is too frightening to live with.

I haven’t liked the “Karen” meme since I dissected it six years ago and Troemel provides further ammunition against it.

The global response to the Paris “student riots” that don’t contain a single student but are infested with Palestine flags is a perfect example of the above. I keep hearing about how only a racist hick would be against burning churches and destroying stores. Some significant percentage of “radlibs” are jizzing their proverbial pants about a video of a Gen X couple calmly smoking and drinking at a Paris cafe while random hoodie-wearing goblins set stuff on fire behind them. “TRUE PARISIENS” and so on. Sure, there’s a certain savoir faire or je ne sais quoi about it — that’s all I remember from two years of college French — but we shouldn’t be praising these people. They are part of the problem. They tolerate and encourage this depravity, they have stood aside while their country was forcibly reshaped by armies of demons acting at the behest of the proverbial one percent.

What’s so uncool, so racist, so hickish about not wanting your city to burn? Would it somehow ruin the art, the music, the architecture if you could let children play on the sidewalk? I can’t say that I’m particularly afraid of most major cities; my son has played a gig in Harlem, we ride our bikes in Queens, I’m happy to walk around in Chicago neighborhoods. But you shouldn’t have to be a man of my general size, bearing, and propensity for mischief to feel safe where you live. And trust me: it could, and maybe will, get a lot worse until both Team Red and Team Blue agree on civic dignity as a worthwhile virtue.

Regulation, of a different sort

someday you, too, will have enough pull to park your cb1100 on the sidewalk at the lounge

If I am lucky in anything besides my slightly-above-average height and reach, it is in my friends. One of them designed and built a Seiko-based watch that he was kind enough to send me as a gift. The dial is his own, the strap is a green shell cordovan piece that I sourced from CAFE in Spain, and the movement is… the notorious Seiko NH35.

The very existence of the NH35 is a testament to our modern society and engineering prowess. It is made in Japan, it has 24 jewels and operates at an acceptable 21,600 vph. And it costs fifty bucks, retail. Never in history has a machine of this precision been so easily and cheaply available, and made in the First World to boot. There’s just one problem: it is a nightmare to regulate. Traditional pocketwatches, and many of the finer movements from Switzerland, Germany, and Japan, all have pretty sophisticated regulator adjustment. To save money, the NH35 forces you to adjust the balance wheel itself using a pair of little metal tabs. You need to tap on them with a non-metallic device so you don’t magnetize the spring, at which point your timekeeping error will be measured in hours per day. I used matchsticks.

Over the course of two hours, I tapped at the balance wheel. If you can actually feel the tabs move, that will correspond to a 100-second per day adjustment. So you tap lightly, which gets you 30 seconds per day. I could not manage a lighter tap than that so I settled for repeatedly tapping in the hopes that I’d settle in at some point. Again, this would take five minutes with a Lange Zeitwerk but that would cost $80,000.

It didn’t help that the NH35 also takes a minute or two to settle in at any given tempo. So you just sit and wait to find out how awfully you’ve screwed it up. But when all was said and done:

So now I have a beautiful watch that was designed by a friend, assembled by a friend, and regulated by me. Like my Lexus ES300, this won’t impress anyone whose desires come from social media and expensive advertising — but like my Lexus, this watch works as well as it does because my friends and I made it that way. So don’t be surprised if I turn my nose up at your white-gold Daytona. I mean, you don’t even know the man who sketched the dial design!

Wheels up, I got to leave this evening

Several weeks ago, I made fun of Fat Brad for wanting airplanes to get rid of their windows. Yesterday I read something neat on Substack that explains part of my issue with his sad little desire:

“A broad loss of a sense of wonder.” I am humbled by this, because it applies to me. For about a ten year period of my life I was flying all the time — not like my brother or father do, but maybe 30-40 trips a year. And I stopped leaving the window up. I started thinking of the plane as a subway of sorts, just a tube that took me to the next annoyance, the next obligation, the next conflict. I would fly to airports in foreign countries, places I’d waited my whole life to see, and I would leave the shade down on the way in. I adopted the ennui of the seasoned traveler, I griped about lounges and transfers and seat assignments. Instead of thanking God for a life where I could travel parts of the world and see things of which my 12-year-old self could not dare to dream, I just existed on the plane.

That was wrong. I’m going to look out the window more in the future. I’m going to be grateful for the time and opportunities remaining to me. I’m going to see more. I hope that you’ll try to feel the same way as you travel — if you travel. And if you do not travel, I hope you will keep your eyes open for the wonders around you at home. A kitten stretching its paws out before bedtime. A child learning something while you watch. The person you love experiencing joy or sorrow. Raise your window. Be a human. I’ll be there with you.

The Red Queen life

An ACF reader shared this observation with me. Once again, someone is saying it well.

Most of my Boomer friends, and some of my Gen X friends, have a story about an astounding opportunity that came their way because there was no one else around to do it, or because of an in-person interaction that would be difficult or impossible to imagine today. I got my first professional writing gig at Bicycles Today because I walked into the office and asked for it. Although most BMX racing was on the coasts, the office was in Hilliard, Ohio. I walked in, saw the editor-in-chief reading Rabbit At Rest, and struck up a conversation. I had just turned nineteen. Today, a mind-blowing thirty-six years later, editors are under a constant assault of emails and social media contacts and phone calls. But in 1990 I could just walk in. Without that meeting, without Jill Geiger, I simply wouldn’t exist to all of you.

Our young men rarely get a chance like that now. They compete with the whole world. The girl you want to date has a hundred thirsty dudes in her DMs, which could literally include the rapper Drake; I’m aware of a story in which a high school teacher got scouted by one of his people to fly out and have sex with him for a weekend. She agreed, and was richly rewarded — but how does that affect her opinion of the 27-year-old, $58,000-a-year science teacher who asked her out the week after?

Every job posting on LinkedIn solemnly informs you that “100 people have applied for this position.” And it doesn’t matter what the position is, wink wink. As William Meijer notes,

Got to eat healthy and hit the gym to looksmax, got to jestermax on dating apps, got to go to nice places to improve your social media, got to get an advanced degree and contract debt to have an ok job, got to bring your cognitive A-game to work, got to bring your sexual A-game the first time, got to be funnier than her options, got to manage your sleep and recovery to compete better.

None of this is mandatory, and some of it is not unique to our time, but both the reward for competing well and the penalty for competing badly are greater than ever. So you kind of have to compete.

As Michel Houellebecq famously observed in his 1994 novel Whatever, liberalism is the extension of competition to every domain of life. Infinite optionality means zero loyalty, and zero loyalty means infinite competition.

I suspect that some of the youth’s inclination toward socialism is longing for some respite, even as the long-term effect of the remedy might be worse than the disease.

If you’re tempted to respond to this with a tale of some unique or rare 2026 situation where it isn’t so, be aware you’re simply noting the exceptions that prove the rule. We live in a Red Queen world — like the character from Alice In Wonderland, we have to run all the time just to stay in place. And now, many of us have to compete with the idea of AI. Not the reality of AI, which varies from shambolic to gloriously incorrect, but the idea of it. All those people who were blithely told to learn coding are 100% fucked. Most of them would probably turn out better code than Claude does, but their bosses would rather spend $200k a year on Claude tokens than pay an entry-level programmer. Claude isn’t going to take a long weekend off work trying to impress some girl who also has a billionaire rapper in her DMs.

A world of gig work and ephemeral relationships where we are all continually trying to reapply for our own jobs and “sarge” our own wives or girlfriends sounds very impressive from an econ-textbook perspective but it is completely enervating as a prospect for the rest of one’s life. I’m about to turn fifty-five and I’m decidedly unthrilled about the idea of ten or fifteen years more continually competing with the whole world for upper-middle-income opportunities. Imagine being seventeen years old and seeing it as your whole life to come. “If you maxx for every single day of the next sixty years, you might end up owning a Ferrari and a Lange Zeitwerk, but the chances are one in a thousand. Orrrrr… you can vote for the DSA. You’ll never be rich, but you’ll have time to play music or paint or raise your kids. Best of all, no one else will be able to lord the products of their maxxing over you. We’re gonna level the playing field and give you a life back.”

Here’s the worst part: I’m overselling the first half of that. The chances of owning a Ferrari and a Lange aren’t one in a thousand. Ferrari makes 100,000 cars in a decade and Lange makes 50,000 watches. Your chances are actually closer to one in fifty thousand. The actual reality is that you’ll jestermaxx and looksmaxx and workmaxx and kiss-your-boss’s-ass-maxx for a chance to own a used 330i and pay rent on someone else’s townhouse. About once a week I get a message from an ACFer that goes something like, “I have done everything I needed to do in my career, I’m 40 years old, and I’m not excited about a single one of the car/watch/art/home/whatever choices available to me.” And those are the positive ones. The sad ones go on to say that they’re single and they’d rather chew glass than date the women at their job or in their local “scene”, whatever it is.

Individually, I can offer these men some proven advice. The ND3 Miata is one of the best sporting cars in history, and you can probably afford it. If you go to church and try some combo of TRT/GLP-1/farmer’s-carries/CrossFit, you can probably improve your dating prospects. My pal “Jay” and I just found a bad-ass 1975 Glashutte export watch for $300 net shipped that will stand up against any Rolex. But the plural of “vigorous self-improvement” is not “an optimistic society”.

from the socialists of Germany, by the way!

Collectively, the men of ACF are a lucky and hard-working group. Socialism might not have much appeal for us. But we would be foolish not to recognize the appeal to others. So, in addition to asking you to raise the window shade on your next plane trip, I’m going to ask you to look out for the young men in your life. Sons, friends, co-workers, fellow participants in your chosen video game or hobby. Help them out. Look for opportunities for them. Don’t judge them like they have the same opportunities you’ve had. Chances are that’s not so. And if you’re a young ACFer looking for an opportunity, drop me a line. The antidote to the perceived community of socialism is… a real community, and the actions we take to create one.

Speaking of. In the next few weeks I’ll be announcing the return of First Principles. Rather than quick-bake one for 2026, I will plan a Midwest and an East Coast gathering for the spring. I’ll be polling the readership about when and where they’d like to make it happen. This is the one thing I feel that I can do to keep this community ball rolling, and I’ll look forward to seeing you there.