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
There are some timeless pieces of wisdom passed down from generation to generation that unfortunately the majority of people are doomed to re-learn for themselves in incredibly painful ways.
This time, it's "Don't stick your dick in crazy."
Best of luck.
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
It is totally unnecessary to get the state involved in that, the market handles it fine. Stay on the right side of the law, do a good job at work and get a few raises, save some money, and boom you find yourself in nicer housing. Prosocial behavior is already well rewarded.
ArmedTooHeavily
11d 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
13d ago
I highly recommend Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk" if you want to see a british ww2 movie.
ArmedTooHeavily
14d ago
#3: if this citizen militia is armed, you're going to get a LOT of unjustified dead bodies. If they aren't armed, they will be ineffective. Granting general citizens a state-sanctioned license to kill is a very, very bad idea (I say this as a strong proponent of the 2nd amendment).
ArmedTooHeavily
14d ago
Tbh it's a pretty vile thing to say, trivializing the unbelievable amounts of human suffering that are occurring.
ArmedTooHeavily
17d ago
I can't speak to bicycle trailer roll cages specifically, but in cars with roll cages hitting your head on the roll cage itself is a very serious possibility. Having a roll cage makes you safer from many kinds of injury (crushing etc), but makes you much more likely to have a head injury because it puts hard parts in range of your head. It is typical in basically all motorsports activities that if you have a roll cage must wear a helmet.
ArmedTooHeavily
18d 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
18d 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
19d ago
Ridiculously bad take. Genetics certainly set a cap on maximum achievable IQ, but the idea that environmental factors cannot suppress IQ is self evidently ridiculous. Do you seriously think childhood nutrition (as an obvious example) plays no part in brain development? "There's no environmental influence on IQ" is as stupid as "there's no genetic influence on IQ."
ArmedTooHeavily
25d ago
Same here, I was practically shitting my britches when I saw the notification. Hugely honored.
I guess those dozens of hours I spent torturing myself by learning about local government dysfunction finally paid off.
ArmedTooHeavily
26d ago
Got it, thanks.
ArmedTooHeavily
27d 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
Again, I have not read Hobbes so I can't speak to what he does or doesn't say. But to put it bluntly, the argument that you ascribe to Hobbes seems pretty fuckin' dumb to me; of course there can be sovereigns whose rule is morally illegitimate and against whom revolution can be morally legitimate.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo 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
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
1mo ago
Is there some sort of tactical school of thought on the efficacy or even purpose of early morning raids?
It's pretty simple: just-awoken or drowsy people are less effective criminals and combatants. Just as an example, I personally have a mental safeguard that I have deliberately curated that makes me double-check any dangerous actions I might make the moment I wake up (like grabbing my nightstand gun), because I have more than once woken up still half-dreaming and hallucinated things that weren't there. If the someone executed a no-knock raid on my house, that just-woke-up hesitation could literally be a matter of life or death.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo 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?
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo 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
1mo ago
Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,' for lack of a better word.
What you are noticing is the difference between actual political philosophy and the advertising used to sell grifters who are nominally aligned with a given philosophy to retards. The two are only related inasmuch as they need to be for the grifters to successfully associate their grift with a tribal affiliation.
The police exist as the enforcement arm of the state in order to hold up the state's half of the bargain in their monopoly on force.
We are making a deal with the state. We give up some things, most notably the right to use violence to enforce our will and of course our money in the form of taxes. In return the state acts as the "unincentivized incentivizer" to solve Molochian coordination problems and arbitrate disputes up to and including using force on our behalf to bring those disputes to a satisfactory close. The police are part of the terms of the contract, so to speak.
It is not a violation of one's autonomy to enter into a contract. Right wingers acknowledge that the state and its monopoly on violence is helpful and necessary (necessary in order to avoid the state of nature, the Hobbesian "war of all against all"), they aren't anarchists.
I think that difference in internal/external locus of control between the Left and Right is better thought of as a side effect of the difference between right and left wing thought, not the source of it. The primary philosophical disagreement from which all others flow is the Hobbes/Rousseau split, which is basically how you would answer, "if we stopped controlling everything and completely took our hands off the wheel, would things be good or bad?" or, "are people inherently good and learn to become evil, or inherently evil and learn to become good?" I think there are a fairly strong selection effects in that people with high personal agency tend to gravitate towards right wing politics, but it's not the cause.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo 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.
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/).
Seconded, this is good advice.
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