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
1yr ago
Not having read your article
this seems like a bad-faith article
classic stuff.
ArmedTooHeavily
1yr 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.
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
9mo ago
Reality tv is not "real." You are drawing strong, condemnatory conclusions about people in the real world because of the way characters in a TV show behave.
Perhaps you shouldn't be too quick to condemn anyone for ignorance.
ArmedTooHeavily
1yr ago
Ffs people, don't feed the trolls.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo 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
1yr ago
One thing that stands out to me is that hitting his ear means that it was definitely not intended that he didn't die. That's too close to a kill shot to be a deliberate graze or not-fatal wound, too much risk even for an expert shot. So this was definitely a failed assassination, whoever did it.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
I think phrasing it as "Progressivism is atheistic puritanical christianity" captures some nuance that "it came from protestantism" doesn't.
ArmedTooHeavily
1yr 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
6d ago
I would like to register profound disagreement here. We should absolutely not relax any rules because "everybody knows we all agree." Allowing consensus building will degrade the quality of commentary significantly.
ArmedTooHeavily
7mo ago
"For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically"
-Will Durant
ArmedTooHeavily
11mo ago
Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
ArmedTooHeavily
1yr ago
Tbh it's a pretty vile thing to say, trivializing the unbelievable amounts of human suffering that are occurring.
Not really, no. It has some right angles is all.
Seconded, "looks like a swastika" is nonsense.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo 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
3mo 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
1yr 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.
ArmedTooHeavily
10mo ago
I think that the progressive prosecutors who release violent criminals (a constant problem in the deep blue city i live in; its very common to see news stories about a violent attack by a perpetrator with 10+ arrests for other violent crimes in the last couple of years) would not say that the goal of their policies is increasing violent crime, but that increasing violent crime is an unfortunate but acceptable side effect of their pursuit of criminal justice reform. So deliberate not in the sense of being the primary goal, but deliberate in the sense that they know it will happen and forge ahead anyway.
ArmedTooHeavily
1yr ago
There comes a point where "is it their fault" doesn't matter. If someone is regularly violently criminal, it doesn't matter if it's because of a brain injury or they're just a sociopathic asshole, what matters is that they be stopped from victimizing other people. Whether or not they are morally culpable is a secondary concern over the need to incapacitate them for the benefit of their would-be victims.
ArmedTooHeavily
1yr ago
Living in a deep blue enclave and being contrarian to my bones, it can be easy for me to start to think of the reds as "my team." Stories like this are an important reminder that they are absolutely not, and that as a rule anyone who makes it to power has abandoned most of the principles I care about.
Very disappointed in this. I fear that the version of freedom of speech that I believe in was the result of fleeting, temporary historical circumstances that will not be repeated, and certainly not while I live.
ArmedTooHeavily
1yr 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.
So saying "oh fighter fell off bc evasive maneuver" smells like BS.
Concurred. I was onboard a carrier while it performed emergency maneuver drills after a shipyard period (max speed ahead to max speed reverse, full speed turns, exactly the sort of things you'd do as "evasive maneuvers"). None of the motion was violent enough to have caused a plane to fall off the ship during towing unless the person driving the tow vehicle was completed retarded. Carriers are huge and change directions very slowly.
That being said, I can also report from my time in the Navy that retards were very common and unbelievably expensive and unbelievably stupid accidents definitely happened.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo 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
7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
Basically the supreme court decision that outlawed blanket IQ testing for jobs because of its disparate impact on blacks.
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:
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.
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.
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, 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.
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