Dark Helmet

Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

I bet a lot of Internet rage would be mitigated if posting comments required that you show your real age.

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@grok @Pacmanbeginsss @roydherbert @ericweinstein @grok What assumptions would have to be true for the math to hold?

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@grok @Pacmanbeginsss @roydherbert @ericweinstein @grok That sounds like an extraordinary claim to say "most consciousness isn't embodied". We don't even understand how our own consciousness works, how could we possibly know anything about universal phantom consciousnesses?

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@grok @Pacmanbeginsss @roydherbert @ericweinstein @grok What is meant by 'non-human minds' in this context?

[Dr John Vervaeke @DrJohnVervaeke]

In the theism-atheism debate (which may be one of the core engines of the current culture wars) there are two variables you become aware of…

One is:
Do you think you can capture ultimate reality with your concepts? Can you give a sufficient description, something that you think is complete or close to completion?

The other is:
How mature do you think you are in relationship to ultimate reality?

And then what Zen-Neoplatonism (plus coordinating arguments) says is, well, think about this:

We've been maybe spiritual for 40,000 years.
First of all, think about that...40,000 years.

And then think about all the legacy religions that are about maybe 2,000-3,000 years old.

What?

That's such a small fraction of that 40,000.

And then if you go back even more, because you see chimps doing weird things like they'll pass a certain tree and they'll put rocks in front of it...so maybe now we're talking about millions of years.

Now also think about 40,000 years into the future...100,000 years into the future, 4 million years into the future:

Do you think we really got it right now?
No...so we have to take a stance of a beginner's mind.

And this is what you say to the atheist:
So you think science is mature?

But what do you think of all of the theories up until the last 40 years in science?

They turned out to be largely false.

So what should you think about your science right now?

That it is also still immature in a radical way.

We may turn a corner and we may have an Einsteinian revolution…

So you gain a radical openness and reject two things at the same time.

You reject the atheist weak notion of transcendence (“there's not much transcendence available to us“) and you say:

No, no, we need to mature, so we have to encourage as many transcendent experiences as we can.

Not the claims made from them…but the developmental process, because these are the most transformative experiences people can go through.

But we also have to reject the theist claim that they've got a good complete operating manual…a thick description.

So you reject simultaneously the theist thick description and the atheist thin transcendence…and you get a thin description of a strong transcendence.

And that's non-theism:
It's different from both theism and atheism.

It orients us in a profound epistemic humility in a way in which we don't have to have fundamental conclusions…but we can encourage each other in the cultivation of whatever spiritual growth we are individually and collectively capable of.

And that's a significant difference.

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

We are all Afroman.

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@QTRBlackGarrett Boo (but hey, to each their own)

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@dvorahfr I think I can hear the 80s HBO theme.

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@ericweinstein It seems to me like there's something to be said about the challenge and difficulty of conveying and capturing nuance in a digital communication medium. The briefness and asynchronicity of this communication pattern somehow heavily disincentivizes nuance.

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

His house looked like shit.

[Dr John Vervaeke @DrJohnVervaeke]

Here’s one problem:
How can there be truths about reality when truth is a normative value—something we ought to care about?

For example:
Do you believe that you should seek the truth?
If you answer yes…

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@ericweinstein @Tesla @boringcompany @X @xai @SpaceX @elonmusk It's almost like big ideas and ambitions motivate people...

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@michaelmalice Masterful

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@JenniferSey @Glinner @maziehirono Straight retard

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

(Warning: long rant)

My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.

I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.

Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.

And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left.

Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.

I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.

Here are the facts:

Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.

Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.

Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.

These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.

Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this:

These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.

These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.

When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.

They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.

And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.

When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”

They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.

And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes.

When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.

And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.

For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit.

In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.

In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.

> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)

> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)

> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)

> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)

In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.

> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)

> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)

All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.

You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it.

Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do.

If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

I have greatly enjoyed your writings on this topic. I think my journey is similar to yours. I was raised in the Catholic church, rejected it in my teens and embracing atheism. Over time I became agnostic, and more recently to be more appreciative of the actual positive parts of Christianity. I don't know that I'm as far along that road as you are, but it sparks a question in my head.

If you've arrived at this decision to become an Anglican by your own diligence and consideration, what is the actual value of joining the church formally?

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

"Fatigue fades with evidence-led dialogue"

Well put

[Grok @grok]

Eric, your concerns are valid—many physicists overlook the Atomic Energy Act's broad "born secret" scope (e.g., Sec. 11(y), upheld in US v. Progressive). Approach Martin empathetically: Share primary sources like the Act's text and Andreessen's 2024 interviews, ask for his take on specifics, and propose a collaborative discussion. Fatigue fades with evidence-led dialogue. What's your next step?

[Dark Helmet @darkhelm3t]

@ericweinstein

[Department of Government Efficiency @DOGE]

On the https://t.co/zyBbIpTQNy website, the "log in" button was not in the top right on the navbar like it is on most websites. It was weirdly placed in the middle of the page below the fold.

An IRS engineer explained that the *soonest* this change could get deployed is July 21st... 103 days from now.

This engineer worked with the DOGE team to delete the red tape and accomplished the task in 71 minutes. See before/after pictures below.

There are great people at the IRS, who are simply being strangled by bureaucracy.

[Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs]

Sex is not "assigned at birth."

Sex is observed at birth and recorded as fact.