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
2mo ago
I'll second @FiveHourMarathon here: if you're asking people on the internet this question, you aren't anywhere near needing to worry about the limits. Lifting weights to get stronger is basically pure upside until you get so deep into it that it becomes a part-time job, and even then it's basically all upside.
I also agree that 1/2/3 plate bench/squat/dead is a good bare minimum for a male lifter; under that your only goal should be getting stronger regardless of any other athletic goal.
I say this as someone genuinely sympathetic to your position in this argument: You are conspicuously and repeatedly dodging /u/somedude's obvious point. If you aren't intending to dodge it, then you should go back and re-read the exchanges in that second link with fresh eyes; the point the people responding to you are making is clearly stated and straightforward and you have missed it. If on the other hand you are intentionally dodging, know that it is incredibly obvious and the virtuous thing to do in this circumstance would be to straightforwardly admit that they are making a good point or actually respond to the substance.
A quick aside: Oregon is a sea of under-populated red surrounding a couple of blue cities, mainly Portland. The Portland metro area has about half the population of the whole state, and therefore Portland mostly controls state-level politics. Where goes Portland, so goes Oregon. So my analysis is mainly focusing on Portland, because that's both where the problem mainly is and where the political will driving all of this originates from.
So: In my opinion, many far-left beliefs are luxury beliefs adopted for their value as status signals. The practical considerations tend to be secondary to the value as a social signal and the costs of these beliefs aren't paid by the people espousing them. People who want to abolish the police aren't typically at risk of being robbed, people who want to subsidize homelessness don't usually live near the homeless, people who want to ban all guns don't usually need to physically protect themselves from violence, people who want to legalize drugs don't interact with drug addicts.
The current state of Portland makes the costs of these luxury beliefs ubiquitous and impossible to ignore. Several events have compounded each other to produce this situation:
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Portland has incredibly lax policies around street homelessness that approach subsidization. This started with then-mayor Charlie Hale's "Housing State Of Emergency" in 2015 which forbid sweeping homeless camps and has gotten worse ever since. Homeless camps filled with people literally driven insane by drugs are ubiquitous. Local governments have gone as far as distributing tents (22,000 in two years!) and even foil and straws for smoking fentanyl to the homeless.
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Following the nine-month anti-police protest/riot/siege at the Portland Justice Center in 2020, the city has massively de-policed. This is a combination of the police deliberately reducing enforcement as a "silent strike", the cops being massively under-manned, and city policies that prevent police work. We are talking multiple-hour response times for everything except life-threatening violent crimes actively being committed. Someone I know personally caught a guy trying to steal the catalytic converter off of his car then followed the perp in a car chase with 911 on the phone for an hour and a half until he lost him. The cops never showed, they contacted him by phone the next day to take a report.
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We legalized drugs completely, as you noted.
These factors have combined to make the drug/homelessness problem so bad at this point that it is seriously negatively affecting everyone in the city. Every person I know who lives in Portland has, in the last couple of years, has been victimized by crime and had multiple negative interactions with the drug addicted homeless. Business are closing and the downtown core of Portland is dying, office workers are refusing to return from work-from-home because of how unsafe it is, and Portland is losing population for the first time in living memory as people flee the dysfunction. The luxury beliefs are finally extracting their costs from the belief-holders, and that's why the tide has turned on this specific issue. However, I don't think you can extrapolate this shift to any greater shift in progressive sentiments. I've had a lot of conversations with people about this: almost universally being a "good progressive" is still very much a core part of the identity of most Portlanders and they are only very begrudgingly ceding ground on drug legalization specifically. They absolutely do not draw any conclusions from this about any of their other beliefs; this threat to their identity is compartmentalized away.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence.
What was the argument about? Could you link it?
ArmedTooHeavily
7d ago
It was not his job to drive through a road blockade.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Tbh it's a pretty vile thing to say, trivializing the unbelievable amounts of human suffering that are occurring.
ArmedTooHeavily
7d ago
Are you kidding?
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
This comment from back when we were on the reddit by @SerenaButler (not sure if they're still with us) discusses the idea you're talking about, and is imo very insightful. Original: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ey1zdz/comment/fh6z9pz/
Text: As a somewhat aside, for the longest time as a kid and/or student I never understood why "Access to jobs" was a cause celebré for advocacy campaigners. Jobs are shit and no sane person would ever want one (at least, absent The Man's omnipresent conditioning that you must work for his profit). Money, sure, everyone wants that. Jobs, no. It's like campaigning to be given sickle cell anemia rather than a malaria vaccine: you are asking for a horrible things that coincidentally happens to be upstream of the result you want, rather than asking for the result you want.
The solution to this problem became apparent the first time I'd worked a few jobs: to wit, many jobs are sinecures where you doss about with your work friends, get paid mostly for "presence", and are not actually required to exert your muscles (intellectual or literal) at all. So that's why people want """jobs""". Government's promising to deliver """jobs""" is really a promise to deliver what people actually want, money-for-nothing, with merely the most tissue-thin sop of "labors to be performed" in exchange for these monies to keep up appearences.
To bring this back around to the quoted point: yes, having understood the above logic, campaigners absolutely would have no problem pushing for unqualified people to get jobs, because, outside of a very limited subset of jobs, like, nuclear power plant technician or something, the accomplishment of the task is irrelevant because the task is essentially a fiction. It does not really need to be completed and no-one will suffer if it is not completed so it doesn't matter if the people assigned to it are unqualified. Most jobs (especially public sector ones) are just dolled-up wealth-transfer programmes, and campaigners understand this, and governments understand this, and """generate jobs for the X community""" is a dog-whistle for "free money for X".
EDIT: Through this rubric, lots of (apparently very irresponsible) Blue Tribe campaigns suddenly snap into focus as perfectly reasonable. Women in front line infantry? Well, if you believe that government jobs are all sinecures and tasks to be performed are fictitious and everyone knows this, therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "upper body strength" or whatever probably are dealing in bad faith misogyny; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ burly dudebros rather than letting women sup from the greenback firehouse. Affirmative action Ivy League admissions? Why not, qualifications = credentialism = fake, there's no real tasks to be performed at Harvard or in post-Harvard employment, so therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "meritocracy" probably are dealing in bad faith racism; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ Good Old Boy WASPS rather than letting minorities sup from the credential spigot.
If you really believe in the bullshit jobs thesis, and you really believe that everyone else is in on the open secret too, then when someone makes the "muh objective competence qualifications" against you, it is perfectly reasonable to believe it's an argument that could only ever be made in bad faith.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
The woke are more correct than the mainstream in asserting that the sum of micro-aggressions is outright aggression- it's just that the only people who really care to micro-aggress are the woke
Ah yes, only your outgroup performs a basic-but-ubiquitous behavior like minor acts of aggression.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I disagree, I don't think this is an accurate description of what most right wingers believe. IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain. You're right that an average RW, high agency person is more likely to be capable of solving problems with violence, but I think they also tend to be more aware of the what the costs of doing so are (especially on a societal scale) and therefore are more likely to prefer the existence of the state/police.
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
Yes, my argument is exactly that: Perry should have been smarter and he had plenty of opportunity to avoid what happened.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Something I've never been clear on, which I think you might be able to explain due to your (astoundingly broad and deep!) geopolitical knowledge:
What exactly does "brazilification" mean? I've seen it used enough and I'm familiar enough with the popular perception of Brazil that I think I've picked up the "vibe", but I find myself wondering if there isn't more to it than just "extreme inequality and crime, favelas in every city where the wealthy never go." Is there a racial component in Brazil, or is it just a socioeconomic thing? Is there a specific historical path that is necessary to count as brazilification?
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
It has effectively become a tax to subsidize vagrancy and drug addiction, because its an easy, low commitment way to get cash. A little while back oregon doubled the bottle deposit to $0.10 per bottle, and a dose of fentanyl is about $0.80. Junkies root through trash cans looking for redeemable cans (leaving any non-redeemable trash they remove on the ground, of course). Another very common occurence is that they will buy cases of bottled water with food stamps, immediately dump the water out into the parking lot of the grocery store, then come back in and redeem the now-empty bottles for cash. The large bottle redemption centers have become magnets for crime and violence to an insane degree.
Meanwhile, Oregonians have a very high default rate of recycling in general (they are, after all, "good progressives" with all the good and bad that entails). The city of Portland has also decreed that residential trash pickup is biweekly, while recycling pickup is weekly, so recycling in general is heavily incentivized. I suspect that if they got rid of the bottle deposit it would make a minimal difference in the rate of can and bottle recycling.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Probably not. Children can be trained into being comfortable wearing a helmet, and 12 mph is absolutely sufficient speed to cause life altering (if not ending) head injuries. The cost/benefit ratio of helmets is very far into the positive. It might take some work to get them used to it, but teaching your kids to wear helmets when doing dangerous activities like bicycling, skateboarding, etc is a very good idea.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I think a no-knock warrant should be classified as potentially lethal force.
What does this actually mean? What specific legal or ethical implications do you think this classification would have? The president declares "No-knock warrants are now classified as potentially lethal force," what changes?
That doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. "Exercise will make you die sooner"? Give me a break, the entire first world is dying from being too fat and too sedentary.
And even if there is some correlation between muscles and morbidity, you'd be a fool to only consider the number of years lived. Physical strength is massively, massively important to quality of life in the elderly. One of the most important reasons to maintain physical vigor is so that when your aging really sets in you have a sufficient physical baseline to not be reduced to invalidity.
To quote Tolkien:
The old which is strong does not whither
Deep roots are not reached by the frost
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen.
The basic premise is that it's a hard sci-fi adventure novel, starring three characters on a single ship as they attempt a heist.
Very fun, very much a page turner and also does a good job at touching on lots of Big Ideas.
Most relevant to this forum, it is a brilliant illustration of all of @HlynkaCG's bugbear, "Academic vs street smarts", "success in the contested environment", whatever you want to call it. My thoughts are only partially formed right now, but I think I'm going to try and write up a longer review that is also going to be at least a partial defense of @HlynkaCG's philosophy. He actually got banned the day I started the book and I'm pretty bummed about it because I'd love to discuss it with him (if you're reading this, create a new account and PM me or something?).
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
"Don't drive into a crowd of screaming people."
"How unreasonable! You can't expect me to be an expert at everything!"
ArmedTooHeavily
7d ago
Ffs people, don't feed the trolls.
ArmedTooHeavily
7d ago
My argument is not a moral argument, it is a practical argument. Did you not read that I said I would acquit?
It wasn't worth it. He accomplished nothing of value and severely damaged his own life. He even damaged his tribe by stepping into the villain role that the blues laid out for him, the same way J6 protesters did (Yarvin is completely right about this).
Of course the same argument applies to Foster, any reasonable reading of the facts utterly condemns him.
That doesn't mean Perry was in the right. They were two retards with guns on a collision course and it ended terribly and predictably.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
"This is the nature of all computer based businesses in a competency crisis and DEI hellworld"
...or just have a couple of your friends proofread before publishing?
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Full disclosure: I haven't read Hobbes, I just know the lingo, so I can't speak to what Leviathan actually says or not. So if you're trying to argue "what you mean is the state in general, not The Leviathan, that's something different" then I must decline to argue.
However, it seems obviously true that nobody is bound to a sovereign permanently and without recourse; history is replete with successful revolutions against governments.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Two things:
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"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.
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You are obviously correct. I think that's because the religious generally don't behave as if they actually believe in predestination or an omniscient god (same thing), not because they don't actually believe in personal agency.
ArmedTooHeavily
8d ago
Thank you, I can't believe I had to scroll this far to see someone questioning the basic validity of this whole story. I swear to god e-girls are the real mind killer, not politics.
I (very much a "gun guy" and an avid motorcycle rider) feel the same way about armed self defence as I feel about motorcycling:
People often get in motorcycle accidents and say "it wasn't my fault!" Maybe technically you're right, and by the laws of the road it wasn't "your fault". Maybe a car failed to yield to you, or ran into you at a stop light, or just merged into you. All clear violations of the law. Congradulations, you're still in the hospital or dead. There are steps that you could have taken to prevent this outcome, and you're paying the price for not taking them. You can be "right" or you can be upright.
There are hundreds of off ramps to almost every violent confrontation, and when it comes to guns, everybody is as vulnerable as a motorcyclist is on the road. Sure, they had no right to block the freeway. Sure, its real fucking sketchy to have one of them come up to your car with a rifle in his hands. Sure, you're probably legally and ethically justified in shooting, so long as you keep the frame of reference constrained to the immediate circumstances. But our ethical lives are not constrained to the immediate circumstances, and Daniel Perry made a series of dumbfuck decisions that led him to the moment his car was being approached by a guy with an AK. I don't think he should be convicted of murder, I would have acquitted, and I also think he is an irresponsible dipshit. His refusal to take the obvious pragmatic precautions like avoiding the protest altogether led to this nightmare, and the retarded culture warrior convictions that led him there were not to his or anyone's benefit.
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