ArmedTooHeavily
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
User ID: 2895
ArmedTooHeavily
3d ago
Not anymore, emergency auto braking is becoming pretty common.
ArmedTooHeavily
3d ago
No, statistics show that cars cause deaths 8x more. That doesn't tell you anything about cyclist behavior, because cyclists are unlikely to cause deaths. My experience has been that cyclists violate road laws much more frequently and egregiously than cars; I see bicyclists run red likes roughly 10x more often than I see cars do so, and I see a LOT more cars than bicycles on any given day.
rarer opposite example of temperamental liberals running on conservative memes?
I think this is the vast majority of people on this website. Hlynka was definitely right about that. Yarvin called them (us) "dark elves" in that one substack post (which did have some good insights, but dear lord is he terrible at optics), and the same people are the "tech right" that has been so recently ascendant until like 8 hours ago. The extremes always pull the moderates to the edges (h/t martyrmade's "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem", the best podcast about Israel and Palestine that's ever been made), and the culture war has pulled scott's "grey tribe" towards the blue and red, and in more even proportions than you'd think.
ArmedTooHeavily
8d ago
I also grew up on Pointless Waste of Time. FYI, the guy who ran PWOT, Jason Pargin (nom de poast David Wong) still has an internet presence. His twitter feed is pretty damn funny. He now has a substack that I think is pretty good and in particular does a very solid job of threading the needle between "don't piss off the blue normies" while still being actually insightful, same basic thread as he did back in the day. He's also been very successful on tiktok (not really my thing, can't comment on quality or anything), I think that's actually mainly how he mainly makes his living.
ArmedTooHeavily
8d ago
This Kurzgesagt video evokes a similar feeling to me: losing something that can never be regained, the crushing weight of the rules of material reality.
ArmedTooHeavily
8d ago
It would be exceptionally easy to make him both well known and universally reviled. Imagine the hit piece a talented killer at the NYT could make about Sam Hyde.
ArmedTooHeavily
11d ago
Relevant, perhaps, but still unwise to attend.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
I think phrasing it as "Progressivism is atheistic puritanical christianity" captures some nuance that "it came from protestantism" doesn't.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Writing off entire major genres of art is needlessly impoverishing yourself. I'm not even a rap fan, but it is obvious that there is artistically great rap music.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
an actually effective piece of viral far right propaganda
You have got to be kidding me. It's a song about how he likes to watch other people fuck his wife, how huffing nitrous oxide is one of the only things that makes him feel better, and how he (a black man) hails Hitler. It's a post-modernist half-joke meme song.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Appreciate it. Looks like I'm bumping it up my reading list.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
See also the current dramas playing out with Elon and his various concubines.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Quote attribution, please
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
The "authoritarian blip" of the last 10k years is certainly not overweighted, because it coincided with the development of absolute human mastery over the entire world. It's heavily weighted in people's estimation of what matters because it was a heavy-ass ten thousand years.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Please do. IMO there's a huge Rickover shaped hole in the sort of broader rationalist/slatestarcodex universe, he's massively under-appreciated.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Just finished "I, Claudius" (big thumbs up) and started "Cute Accelerationism", which is basically about "cuteness" as an inhuman thing summoned from the Outside by technology. One of the co-authors was in the CCRU with Nick Land and this is very much both in the tradition of and sort of a send-up of Landian accelerationism. I haven't yet decided what I think of it or how seriously to take it; some portion of it is definitely a bit/gimmick but it's a really delightful gimmick (the physical book itself being tiny and cute is sort of emblematic here). Whatever it is, I'm really enjoying how it manages to be dense and obscure while simultaneously being really fun.
This interview with the authors tipped me over the edge to buying it after Amazon recommended it to me: https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-amy-ireland-maya-b-kronic-cute-accelerationism
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
you can only cut so much
Wrong.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Those conditions (likely) don't change the "amount" of self control you have, but they do change how much your desire to eat is weighted in the semi-conscious calculation of what you end up choosing to do. Self-control is your ability to over-ride unconscious, animal instincts in favor of conscious choices. In the case of a medical condition that makes you hungrier, it does in fact require more self control to not eat more, but that doesn't mean that it isn't ultimately a question of self control that determines whether or not you eat more.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
There's a big distinction between obesity and poverty:
To become not-poor, you need to both do things you are currently not doing and do them in a way that gets other people to give you money for those things you do. You're adding behaviors, and you have to socially coordinate.
To become not-fat, you only need to not do a thing (eat). It requires no social coordination whatsoever, it requires no additional action, you literally only have to choose to not pick up the fork.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
If you had perfect knowledge of the physical makeup of a human body and perfect knowledge of physics, you could perfectly predict the results of any input on that body, no need for cludging together predictions with meta-knowledge like what evolutionary pressures led to that physical arrangement of atoms. People are deterministic machines like literally everything else.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines
You are wrong in about fifteen different ways here, but I'll highlight this one: humans are in fact machines, just very complicated ones made out of meat.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Paradoxically, this happens in part because we don't spend enough on homeless shelters.
Nope. Absolutely fucking not. Not only will further subsidization just incentivize more homelessness, we have massively increased our homelessness spending concurrent with the homeless problem getting worse. We've run this experiment and it didn't work.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
As someone who lives in a city that's really gone to shit because of feral homeless, this kind of strawmanning is a pet peeve of mine. All that it would take to clean up the problems with the homeless is enforcing laws currently on the books. They harass somebody? Prosecute them. They jerk off in a library? Prosecute them. They dump out a garbage can on the sidewalk to look for reimbursable cans? Prosecute them. The problematic homeless are constantly committing crimes, JUST PROSECUTE THOSE CRIMES. That's all it would take!
I can't say that I would object too hard if my city adopted Judge Dredd rules and started executing vagrants, but there's no need for any tyranny at all besides the tyranny of basic law enforcement.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
Marijuana legalization has been a disaster. We have ugly dispensaries and billboards everywhere and consumption of marijuana has skyrocketed. I don't even think it's reduced violent crime. Near me, in Seattle, the areas around dispensaries attract the worst people and there have been murders nearby.
As someone who lives in a weed-legal state (Oregon), I disagree with this. A couple reasons:
-
The weed market is currently crashing hard. The gold rush is over, dispensaries are failing left and right, and weed farms are hugely overproducing leading to incredibly low prices. In 5 years there will be a LOT less dispensaries, billboards, etc.
-
A significant cause of violence at dispensaries is that the bank/credit card companies will not service dispensaries because of federal laws. This means that dispensaries are forced to work in cash and that makes them juicy targets for robberies. There's nothing about weed stores that's inherently violence-causing besides this; even consuming the product makes you less violent. If the federal legal complications get cleaned up (aka we get federal legalization) most of the issues with crime and violence will dissolve. And it has, in fact, reduced violent crime by eliminating the black market trade.
That being said, I agree with Lomez about this more generally and am firmly against legalization of all other drugs (holy shit legalizing meth and opiates has been a disaster).
I don't see how that's relevant to my point at all, which is that that death rates don't tell you much about rates of bad behavior. Obviously cars are more likely to kill someone, ke=1/2mv^2 and cars have a lot more m and a lot more v. I think cyclists commit bad behaviors much more often.
More options
Context Copy link