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
3mo ago
For Portland, there's no Bellevue across the lake to act as a beacon of sanity and order.
Yes, there is: Vancouver, WA. It's across a river rather than across a lake, but the political relationship is very similar.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
I think it seems rather foolish to make assumptions about how good the CIA is at secret assassinations, considering that by definition you only ever hear about the times they are unsuccessful. Even the rough number of attempts is totally invisible to you or I.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I don't think that's mental gymnastics, I think he's making a joke.
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.
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.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Certainly, my point was just that Oregon politics are more or less uni-polar centered around Portland.
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
2mo ago
In my experience, the claim "X has never happened before in history!" is almost always founded in a paucity of historical understanding and imagination. There is nothing new under the sun and the past contains an almost infinite well of horrors for the present to draw from.
The first sentence in the "history" section of the wikipedia article for castrato says this: "Castration as a means of subjugation, enslavement or other punishment has a very long history, dating back to ancient Sumer." Spend some time thinking about the depth and breadth of brutality and misery that sentence contains. Contextualize your breathless outrage.
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
2mo ago
I think that's more of a deliberate setting choice rather than being downstream of politics; it makes sense in-universe that the rejects would be ugly and it's not like the male characters you can create are any better looking. Everybody in that game is ugly.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
That is not "I cannot be trusted with a woman," but rather "there are good reasons not to be alone with a woman who is not my wife." The issue is not the possibility of his improper behavior, the issue is preventing the possibility of accusations of impropriety.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Hard disagree, this is a too-online problem. Useful relationship and dating advice isn't (often) given on the internet or in other media because of incentives to show people what they want and people's ability to filter to only get what they want. Useful relationship and dating advice is emphatically not what people want to hear because it inevitably involves "fix your own bullshit, do what's needed even though it's hard, your problems are mostly your own fault."
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
2mo ago
I second @AvocadoPanic, I think that the economic incentives via CAFE standards on automakers have made superhuge trucks artificially competitive in the market.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I would have loved it at 13, though I wouldn't have understood all of the themes or subtext. "R-rated" graphic violence, though not gratuitous. So far no actual sex, but erections and breasts are occasionally discussed.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I think that Zvi did a much better job at explaining the complexities of media literacy than Scott in his "On Bounded Distrust": https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-bounded-distrust
Personally I think that this example lends an impression so different from the truth that calling it a lie is obviously correct. Or, if you want to pedantic about "technically correct," you could just call it "complete bullshit."
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
A "plate" is a colloquialism for the heaviest standard barbell weight size, 45 lbs (~20 kg). That also happens to be the weight of a standard barbell, so a "1 plate" lift would be a 45 lb bar with a 45 lb weight on each side totalling 135 lbs (61 kg). "2 plate" is 225, "3 plate" is 315.
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.
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
Whats your squat PR?
I ask because in my experience 100% of the people who say any variation of "you'll get too big" (in this case "even hobbyist natural lifters are expected to have BMIs at 25 or over") have never picked up a barbell in their lives. It just doesn't happen, it's not a concern, its media-created fantasy. It's like people who say "why didn't he shoot the gun out of his hands?"
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Purple pill is simply "red and blue pill mixed together"
This is an excellent list and was more fun to read and see how many I knew than I expected. A couple comments:
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A defining feature of a purity spiral is that it is a feedback loop, resulting in people adopting ever more extreme beliefs. Person A makes a statement or adopts a belief demonstrating their ideological virtue, Person B sees that and responds by making a more extreme statement or adopting a more extreme belief that shows that they are even more virtuous, Person C see that and ups the ante again, etc. This dynamic is very common; it is the reason people in niche music communities put such high value on obscure out-of-print cassettes, as an example. Niche one-upsmanship, basically.
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I think Von Neumann tends to get used as a symbol not just for the big-brained, but for people who are so smart it is superman or supernatural. Basically he's a stand in for "the smartest human being to ever live." The origin of the use of Von Neumann as a shorthand in the rationalist community comes mainly from Scott's book review of a biography of him (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future), as well as his articles "the Parable of the Talents" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) and "The Atomic Bomb Considered as a Hungarian High School Project" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/).
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.
Nick Land discussed this in "The Dark Enlightenment":
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