teleoplexy
15d ago
The solution is skin in the game. The person making the decisions needs to be personally impacted by outcomes.
teleoplexy
15d ago
teleoplexy
24d ago
Yes, it's something like the Finland solution that Scott talks about in his article. It works in a lot of places, but (without knowing the specific countries you are talking about), Finland has:
- Cold winters as a deterrent. You can't live on a street, just like in Russia.
- Institutionalization without needing consent.
- Good system of reintegration.
In Canada I want us to move the needle towards safeguarding citizens even a little bit, so proposing the most expensive solutions that require a lot of funding and good will from the public seems like kicking the problem down the road because Canadians neither want to fund, nor do the politicians have the good will.
If you are talking about something else, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how you think this was achieved without the oppressive way of dealing with the problem.
teleoplexy
24d ago
I'm jealous that I didn't come up with this - it was right there, really.
teleoplexy
24d ago
To me the difference is imminently obvious:
- I can't start beating up or threatening people I find unpleasant. Dangerous? Threatening me with a polearm? Yes. Unpleasant? No. Most of the Vancouver's homeless are unpleasant, but as others pointed out, they are more of a nuissance. I just don't see the utility of a gun when someone is shitting on a sidewalk.
- Police, on the other hand, have the authority to stop the shittening, the Methland invasions but their most important power is to shape the society in a way, where people will think twice before shooting up in the first place.
The catch is that the nuiscance stage is only the beginning of backsliding. Police has the unique opportunity to stop the freefall into the nightmare stage. You think about dealing with the nightmare stage, where crime is through the roof and you need to defend yourself, I think about how we can prevent it.
teleoplexy
24d ago
Oh certainly, other cities have it bad too and I didn't intend to present Vancouver as a uniquely bad locus of dark forces. Certainly no dismembered people in fhish tanks. It's just that Vancouver suddenly became medieval, I found it strange, funny, worthy of weaving the narrative around.
I don't want to seem as I backtrack from the original statement - I think the situation in Vancouver is worse than it's ever been in Moscow and I'm baffled that nobody is working towards improvement. Moreover, people accept it as status quo, turn a blind eye to it, which is reflected in your mindset of "only some fent zombies". The correct amount of fent zombies, according to my impossibly high foreigner standards is "none".
With that out of the way, The Halberd + Medieval Weapons Locker struck a chord in my brain: did we Vancouverites somehow found ourselves in medieval times? And that's how idea the post was born. Am I worried for my life every time I go downtown? No, it's fine most of the time and the problem really is localized to East Hastings, Granville, Chinatown. I found it weird to have 3 cool meth-related incidents in one year around where I have lunch sometimes, far outside of those isolated areas. Do other cities have it worse? Absolutely.
Vancouver overall is beautiful and I do love living here, I wouldn't stay if I didn't love it here. The positives absolutely outweigh the negatives.
teleoplexy
24d ago
I'm flattered! It's also probably the quickest turnaround on AAQC that I've seen. Still up and active in this week's thread.
teleoplexy
25d ago
If I were a Tzar of BC, and had a save file to roll it all back when Vancouverites inevitably try to kill me, all of the zoning laws would go. There would be two zones: "mixed use" and "industrial", the minute details I'll figure out as we go.
teleoplexy
25d ago
I didn't know about the study. Would you share a link with me?
But also, the baffling part, regardless of why was it put there in the first place, legitimately or illegitimately, is the common sense of the situation: the playing ground was already there, less than a block away.
teleoplexy
25d ago
legalize gun ownership
Canadians define themselves as a society, that is more civilized, more progressive, more better than USA. I don't think this is going a popular proposition amongst the majority of citizens, unlike dealing with the homeless in one way or another.
deregulate housing
Vancouver desperately needs more of this, but not to get rid of homelessness, just to make the city more affordable, which will tackle homelessness to an extent. However my argument is that creating more housing isn't enough. There should be more incentives for people to not go homeless. By carrot or by stick. Would I prefer carrot? Yes, I'm enjoying my carrots already. Some people just need a stick, don't you agree?
teleoplexy
25d ago
Acceptable outcome for me, but what's interesting is that weapons in Russia are very illegal and controlled, much like in Canada. If I'd rank my preference for the outcomes it would be:
- No guns / Limited homelessness (i.e. Russia)
- Guns / Limited homelessness (i.e. Texas)
- No guns / UNLIMITED homelessness (i.e. Canada / California)
Alas, I don't think it's possible to easily legalize guns in very very progressive Canada
The A&W Halberd
The A&W Halberd is a makeshift weapon, an artifact most likely inspired by meth demons or related brain damage. It is a fine piece of methgineering. The weapon is composed of a crimson plastic broomstick, two chef knives (dull), and copious amounts of grey duct tape. One of the knives was attached to serve as the tip of the Halberd. To poke with. The other, perpendicular to the broomstick, is evidently for striking overhead.
One cold morning, armed with this masterpiece of a weapon, a knight possessed by evil methgic hastily stumbled into A&W. He was agitated, yelling, mumbling, shifting in unnatural ways. We'll never determine whether he arrived to vanquish the demons or to aid their evil cause; the knight was captured by the police of my beautiful, medieval city, Vancouver, BC. We'll never know the real cause. But there is a silver lining to this incident: nobody, not even a single Teen-type burger, was harmed.
Did you know that one homeless shelter in Vancouver, according to this commenter, has a weapon locker that has seen all sorts of medieval arms? Crossbows, maces, flails, swords, shurikens, you name it. If you can imagine it, methiculous methgineers can construct it. Guns are for modern times. Guns are boring. Halberds, spears, whips. Bows, nunchakus, quarterstaffs. These are the weapons I find infinitely more appealing. Infinitely more appropriate for a medieval city like Vancouver. The shelter staff agrees with me: they only reported guns to the police and not anything else of the endless selection of arms surrendered to the locker.
Shortly preceding the A&W Halberd incident, there was a hostage situation involving a dagger-wielding rogue (it might have been a knife in all actuality, but bear with me if you will). That wretched 7-Eleven is not two blocks away from the unfortunate A&W, to which the knight showed up with the halberd. The rogue was shot with the boring guns by the boring police. In the summer of the same year, a machete (let's imagine it as a shortsword) was employed by one raging barbarian to sever an arm of one stranger and a head of another.
These are the three incidents that were deemed worthy of reporting on by newspapers in our boring non-medieval world. But there are many more that go unreported, evident to me by the fact that I had a personal one in the time between the Halberd one and the 7-Eleven one, right by Vancouver Public Library, just across the road from the very same 7-Eleven. A tall 6'5" warlock, dressed in scraps, eyes devoid of any emotion but rabid madness, was trying to obstruct the path of a maiden, and I'm proud to say I fended him off. I waded into the dark medieval fairy tale of Methland for a quick second and became a hero of the day, saved the maiden. In all honesty, it was not really a great act of heroism; I put myself between the warlock and the maiden and with an awkward yet firm gesture kinda shooed him away, more like. His excuse for being creepy was yelled in our backs: "I was just trying to get directions!" If you say so, but I don't trust mad warlocks. If you commute to downtown Vancouver, I wouldn't be surprised if you had an encounter like this yourself.
I have many more incidents to spin my yarn about, much less scary ones, but for now, behold this map. I put all of the four incidents mentioned above on it. With the red cross, I marked my personal treasure: it's a Japanese cuisine place called Ebiten, serving a delicious plate of Kimchi Yaki Udon. I work 10 minutes away from it, and on the days I'm overcome by a bout of laziness sufficient enough for me to forego cooking for the next day, I fancy myself this succulent Chinese Japanese meal. Also on the map, you can find that murky, dark place, the infamous East Hastings street and it's younger brother Granville street, where I was told all of the vagrants are localized and who never stray from those regions.
I live in this fairytale city. I'm on Robson St every work day, commuting. I'm here to tell you that this predicament Vancouver and the whole of Canada found itself in is crazy. Having my office building do multiple lockdowns in one year is not in any way, shape, or form normal. I'm an immigrant here in Vancouver, and I readily admit I don't know the customs and traditions as well as the natively born Canadians, but when they tell me in the comments to the Halberd incident article on Reddit that I lead a sheltered existence, I have to respond: you've lost your mind. It's hard for me to express how thoroughly the Forces of Evil defeated everyday citizens of Canada.
I'm originally from Russia, that backward warmongering authoritarian country, and naturally, I made friends with Russians here in Vancouver. One of my friends waded into that dark domain of East Hastings drove through East Hastings in order to record it, by the request of her father. He's a teacher and now uses the footage as a piece of propaganda about the decaying West - it's that jarring to us Russians. It's bizarre to our sheltered minds: the tents, the drug use, all of the fent zombies bending down, all of the trash piling up on the sidewalk. Not to say that homelessness doesn't exist in Russia; it naturally does. Just take the Three Station Square in Moscow (famously visited by Tucker Carlson) that serves as a shelter for the homeless during the winter frost and in all other months too but especially during the cold winter months. When the denizens get kicked out of one station, they migrate to another - a perpetual problem for the guards and the police, an eyesore for the commuters (more of a nosesore? is that a word? they smell is what I mean).
(Sidetracking, calling a station on Three Station Square "a station" is a disgrace to it, to be honest. It's vokzal (вокзал). A big station. A grand station even. Each vokzal is a huge pavilion and for you North Americans to understand - it's big-mall-sized. More-than-a-big-Costco-sized. Imagine enormous Stalin-era-skyscraper style waiting halls and nooks and crannies and unused toilets where you can sleep, drink and shoot up at night)
Homeless people in Russia are neatly tucked away for the most part. It's harder to see them than in Canada, where they sit or lay everywhere cocooned into blankets. In Russia drug users mostly use drugs in condos and apartments. For the most part homeless people huddle in the aforementioned vokzals and stations, underground walkways or maybe along insulated pipes, anywhere warm, in fact. Train drivers traditionally turn up the heat in one or two cars on the last late-night intercity train for the homeless to warm up and sleep in peace during the winter (a small act of kindness, but not a sentiment broadly shared by the public. From 2023 onwards, persons in dirty clothes are forbidden from entering public transport, as if it wasn't already hard to be a homeless person). Sewers and entrance halls for apartment buildings can tide one over for a night. Public spaces like vokzals are the main ways to survive - various NGOs like Nochlezhka and government organizations like Doctor Liza are much more scarce and have much less funding than their Western counterparts.
I didn't live in Moscow, but I lived next to Moscow, commuted there every day. To me, trains, train stations, subways, and public transport are familiar environments, so naturally, I met a decent amount of homeless people. Maybe they were fragrant and unpleasant and often drunk, but I was never afraid of them (and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm afraid of the Vancouver ones). The homeless in my motherland were rarely drug addicts, and even then, never were they really aggressive. I felt (and still feel) pity for most homeless when they were harassed by the police. I still perceive them as people down on their luck and for the most part they were. From what I know, it is not uncommon for Russian homeless people to be working towards reintegration. They weren't scary and that's the most important part. They lived a regrettable existence, but they were still humans who held on to some semblance of dignity that I almost never see in homeless people in the West.
As sheltered as my upbringing was (I like to think that it wasn't), I was never on guard when I was at Three Station Square; I could never imagine an "unhoused person" in Russia threatening me with a makeshift polearm, it just wasn't an issue for me or anyone else commuting downtown. Did I expect them to beg for change? Yes. Stab me? No. Expecting it and just accepting it as a status quo, from my oh so very sheltered perspective, is crazy. This commenter, and from my perspective, Western society at large just gave up, surrendered after a few policy misses, and just left this wound to fester and fester until cities like Vancouver ended up magically teleporting back in time, to medieval Europe with polearms and all. Don't westerners want to enjoy their burgers without being embroiled in a 100 year war?
My first idea is that everyone just fled downtown to quiet and comfortable suburbs and this is why Canadians don't care, but don't Vancouverites work downtown, commute there and have to deal with this shit and squalor every single work day of their lives? Downtown Vancouver is chock-full of offices, various government services, restaurants, sight-seeing attractions, doctor offices, etc. There are legit reasons to go there every day of the week. Well, I find one. I don't want this to become an urban vs suburban debate: it's just that as a person who grew up in a very urban environment of Moscow, I'm shocked to see the neglect of the shared parts of your city.
One big difference I see between how Russia treats homeless people and how Canada does is that it's just hard for them to live as vagabonds. Yes, you technically can tuck them away in vokzals and underground walkways, but it doesn't mean that the police aren't harassing them constantly. Yes, it's not illegal to live as a homeless person, but it's also really hard and shameful. You can't really sleep in a vokzal without getting woken up every hour by a cop who tells you to remove your feet from the bench. And cops will kick you and punch you too, a big taboo in the West (those damned "human rights or whatever). Having less funding, NGOs can't provide the same level of care as in the West. They don't receive as much in subsidies. Homeless are routinely getting kicked off public transport by the police or even commuters. They are refused entrance to grocery stores and medical facilities.
It's really, really cold during winter in Russia. The most common cause of death for a homeless person in my Motherland is freezing to death. That fear of death, less drugs on the street, constant harassment and shame are crucial motivators. These things sound bad, but the fear of getting beaten, the fear of hardship, the fear of freezing to death can be drivers for rehabilitation and, most importantly, prevention.
In 2024 Scott wrote about homelessness. I posted the article. When I hear about the Finnish model touted by Scott, it makes me laugh. If you see a medieval encampment like the Skidrow on your street and your thought is "let's make their life even simpler" you've given up on the homelessness problem. It's honestly self-evident to me: make their life harder for them! Not simpler! Scott admits himself that draconian ways work in the article, so let's do it, why not do it the draconian way? We are not even talking about people experiencing temporary homelessness, we are talking about hardcore drug users who are dangerous to themselves and to the society at large. They don't feel any sympathy for me or a for a guy getting stabbed when he buys a Monster Energy Gold at a 7-Eleven, so to me, a foreigner to this culture it's impossible to understand why Canadians still feel sympathy for them. It's so evident to me: no more safe-injection sites, no more funding to NGOs, no more investment into safe supply, no more free money and food to subsidize drug-addiction lifestyle with it.
When I see Ken Sim, the current mayor, do a "fire inspection" clean up of East Hastings it makes me... audibly sigh. You have this dangerous, armed medieval brigade and your best idea wasn't to make their life harder. Your idea was to evenly spread them across the city. With all of their weapons. Huh?
When I see a safe-injection site next to the most hipster movie theater in Vancouver (VIFF) and a playground for kids, it makes me laugh, again. The West truly may have fallen, I refused to believe it until I saw it with my own eyes: a guy smoking meth (presumably he got it from the safe-injection site) on that playground and not a single father to even try telling him to fuck off. People just stopped using that part of the playground, moved aside in fear. Not a police officer in sight too. Don't even get me started about a meth zombie erratically waving a knife near kids with a knife in a school. (While trying to find the exact article I saw, I found out that there were multiple incidents involving schools and men armed with knives).
My solutions for this problem are as radical as they come and I feel silly typing them out because they seem so self-evident to me:
- You need to empower police to be brutal, make it dangerous to your life to be a homeless drug user. This part will serve as a replacement for a cold Russian climate. Make it known to every homeless drug addict: you will not be warm, you will not be fed and you will be jailed and sent to rot in prison for life if you do this. Human rights are for upstanding citizens and if you abuse drugs, you forfeit your human rights just as you have forfeited your brain cells in a pursuit of a cheap thrill.
- The patchwork of useless bleeding heart NGOs managing this crisis must go. It's time to reinstitute all of the previously closed mental health hospitals like Riverview, for the sole purpose of safeguarding citizens and especially children.
- The libertarian objection of "who's going to pay for it" is obvious here: IMO the value of shared urban areas is self-evident enough to use tax-payer money to clean up the streets. I'd like to argue about this from-the-first-principles-style some time in the future, but this post is not about the inherent social value of urban areas.
- This one is much harder, but if I could, I would drill it into every Canadian's head: it is your business when someone acts anti-socially. No shaming, no disgust, no pushback only empowers the belligerent homeless population and disempowers police.
There's one and only one takeaway from this whole ordeal for Canadians, the one that will prevent the worsening of already bad areas once and for all: you can't entrust your safety to someone who fundamentally cares about fent zombies more than they care about making your presence in the city safe and pleasant.
So when a commenter tells someone who is surprised by the plethora of weapons in the homeless shelter weapons locker that he lived a sheltered existence, maybe I did live a sheltered life, maybe I did, but I also know when I'm afraid and I see with my own eyes that you are afraid of the archers and infantrymen of Methland too. I've seen liberals go "I'm not actually uncomfortable about them, homelessness is just a part of life and you need to be okay with it. That's just what Downtown is like" and at the same time conveniently avert their eyes from a situation where your compatriots yield completely when a part of a playground for kids is occupied by an invader. Well, in any case, their compassion for drug addicts seems horribly misplaced, at the very least.
The question of "why and how did we allow all of this to go to shit?" is the hardest part. Does it all go back to the old Motte argument that the police in the West exist to protect homeless people from you, not vice versa? (I'd be grateful if someone could link). If so, why? Or is it just a temporary liberalism pendulum swing that happened perfectly in sync with drugs becoming more potent than ever before in history? I don't know. I'm just an observer whose opinion on homelessness was shifted to a diametrically opposite one by real-life experiences of living in a West Coast city.
I'll close with this: Canadians, you don't have to give up multiple streets of your beautiful city. This city doesn't really need to stay medieval. Neither you need to give up your emergency room — it can be safe, actually — for the staff and for the patients.
A&W can be safe, too! Take your A&W back! Be mad! No sane person should have more sympathy for Methland invaders than for little children! My message to proud Canadians: you don't deserve to live in fear of being stabbed by a polearm!
teleoplexy
29d ago
my opposition to gender transitioning prepubescent children does not hinge on science and I would not be convinced by studies that purported to show that it's actually very good for children
What is it based on?
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Thank you for the discussion! I think it heavily veers into sci-fi territory, but it's fun to think about.
In addition to /u/RenOS excellent comment:
Our identity is inextricably shaped by our actions and behaviours. Personality is shaped by the things you do. One of the pernicious aspects of this phenomenon is that introspection - the act of soul-searching - is a formative behaviour itself. Going through puberty is something natural that all of us do, but modern culture encourages deliberate exploration of gender identity: scrutinizing bodily discomfort, exploring potential gender expressions, and contemplating one's emotional responses to one's changing body. This thinking, stewing, brewing in the process of exploration shapes you as a person as much as biological puberty itself.
"You can be whatever you want! Are you a boy? Are you a girl? You get to decide!" - we encourage self-determination, the act of contemplation nowadays, as if it's a choice, as if the real identity somehow resides within you, you just need to discover it. Children marinate in this environment and then we act surprised when children come out as gender-havers. Of course! Modern society (and especially the internet culture) amplified their gender sensibilities deliberately and, IMO it's reasonable to assume, it created the sense of gender within them. To boot, there's already a preconceived notion that this gender that they themselves discovered within can be misaligned!
Some people go as far as reaching the conclusion of having a xenogender identification. Or it's also entirely possible to convince yourself that you are an animal through vigorous quadrobics. This is done through an act of pondering, through thorough investigation of yourself, through consciously trying to apply various genders to your identity - not vice versa. Why do we think that this gender feeling is innate? Why do we think that altering your identity like this is normal? Or even good? Or something inherent? Given the marked increase in gender identity discussions throughout the 21st century, we should at the very minimum entertain the possibility that gender-focused rumination is just a harmful meme.
If you ask me, a nobody on the internet, whether I want anyone to feel bad about permanent changes their body goes through - no! But instead of shaping your personality through questioning and extending this period using puberty blockers, why don't we also encourage, as /u/RenOS, said becoming heteronormative through puberty and then continue to lead normal lives after that? What makes puberty blockers inherently a better choice than a natural process that in most cases leads to a straightforward, normal life trajectory?
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Consciousness isn't computation - it's fundamentally embedded into the biological processes. It also doesn't emerge from neural networks regardless of how well they mimic behaviours of real humans. Neural networks are statistical models, while you are your un-statistical emotions, you are your hormonal systems, microbiomes, other physical systems within your body. If you just extract the consciousness + the memories, just the raw contents of your brain and put them into the machine, you lose everything else, which is arguably the most important part. You get alien consciousness. Your consciousness is your consciousness BECAUSE of all of those icky yucky things attached to your brain, not DESPITE. If your replace them, why do you assume continuity?
All of this irreducible complexity can't be reimplemented by assuming that everything is an algorithm. Emotions aren't algorithmic abstract patterns, they are complex interactions between neurons and other biological systems and they are a fundamental part of the biological reality that makes you "you". Omitting them makes you a spider, an alien.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
I'm a transhumanist. I'm not a transgenderist in any meaningful sense. I'm very happy being a man rather than a woman. I'd be even happier as a post-gender Matrioshka Brain.
Dont your body, your brain chemistry, your experiences and limitations make you "you"? Matrioshka Brain Self_Made_Human wouldn't be you. It would be something entirely different, akin to a Praying Mantis Self_Made_Human or a Spider Self_Made_Human. To me, it sounds like you are okay with killing yourself and replacing yourself with something that was created from you but is not fundamentally you.
I don't know if that makes sense, this statement just sounded utterly alien to me.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
- I’ve seen multiple articles about some 50xx models melting power supply connectors under load. I’d research that a bit more before pulling the trigger.
- Depends on the games you play, 9800x3d would be such an overkill for me. I know I’m always tempted by the latest and greatest but I built a cheaper system 4 years ago and haven’t regretted it at all. Of course YMMV based on the games you play - you know your needs better than anyone
teleoplexy
1mo ago
I guess you'd also have to execute a bunch of Russians as well, in this case. It's more of a mentality thing - there's little patriotism in any post-Soviet countries
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Most people who self-identify as communists are firmly in the conflict theory camp. They don't just misunderstand how the world work, they do not just misunderstand capitalism, they also think:
- US government and more specifically CIA is behind every setback the labor movement experienced in 20th century.
- Astroturfing, infiltration, wrecking is everywhere and the movement has to be diligent to preserve the ideological purity
- Everyone who disagrees with them hasn't read Marx.
- Everyone who disagrees with Marx is an enemy, regardless of whether they are a capitalist or a proletarian.
You can't really convince someone who has built mental walls around their belief that the only salvation for our world is the revolution. This isn't a rational belief.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Putin's Russia does not have the ideological basis for expansion
Russian World. A quote from here:
"The collapse of the USSR was a tragedy" The President stated that as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the state lost what "had been built up over a thousand years."
Idk, that sounds to me like ideological basis for expansion.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
But he doesn’t. He just keeps pushing, and Trump and JD, who hold ALL of the leverage in this situation, respond predictably.
He isn't wrong to ask for concrete guarantees that weren't actually in the mineral deal. Pointing out that Russia already broke the agreements in connection with this conflict isn't pushing, it's just plain and simple statement of facts - there's no reason to assume that Putin won't break the deal again. Vance and Trump refuse to even acknowledge this point, while continuing to talk to Putin behind Zelensky's back.
I'm pro-Zelensky taking an L, sucking up to Trump and stopping the war at all cost, but this can't happen without the guarantee that in some way shape or form prevents another invasion in the future.
teleoplexy
2mo ago
Do you love her or just do it for your daughter?
To join the choir, initially I read the comment as being about culture, not violence. Entirely undeserved, in my opinion. It's not a quality comment as it doesn't speak plainly, but you inferred the worst possible meaning from it.
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