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Posts by Lanny
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2015-09-24 at 5:29 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Oh yeah, that sounds like what I need. May focus on this instead. Experiencing relief from everything could be the most therapeutic experience of all.
Don't run from your problems, stand and deliver! Take all the shitty things in your life, look them in the eye, and say "I'm not afraid to confront you". When you the face the induced subjective experience of dying and come to terms with it, unafraid and unflinching, you realize afterwards that the real thing can't be that scary, the prospect no longer holds power over you because you've seen how bad it gets and you're still here. The same goes for every neurosis, anxiety, and insecurity. Once faced and blown radically out of proportion by the experience the psychological part of any problem is functionally gone, closure has been had.How much? This seems to be the best place, and I was about to order, but they're out of stock for two weeks. -_- Well, this is what happens when I procrastinate due to self-destructive impulses.
www.purposechem.com
Depending on the price, somewhere in the 3-7 grams range. Prices aren't listed since it's OoS, do you know what they were before?
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2015-09-24 at 5:05 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Because I'm a dysfunctional trainwreck and it would take too long to explain why. I don't have a particularly good reason for putting off relatively minor things for months. All I need to do is order some etizolam and that's it. … Alright, I'm doing it, I think! I'll try to do it today unless I can think of a good reason to delay myself again.
Do it mang. If you still haven't by the time I get my etiz I'll send you some and whatever lsd analogue I have on hand if you send me an address. It would be a kick to make little packets that contain enough LSD/LSD analogue for a good trip and a benzo to kill it, a little pamphlet explaining how and when to use each, and an email address to mail trip reports to and distribute them to people who I think could have interesting experiences like young mathematicians, people in chess clubs, experimental musicians who haven't tried psychedelics before. I think it would be fascinating to see how domain expertise affects early experiences. Wouldn't even be that expensive, 20 tops on the psychadelic, maybe another 5 on the benzo, think of the amazing experiences even possible breakthroughs you could be directly responsible for a measly $25. Maybe I should mail this idea to some prominent figures in the effective altruism community with one of these sampler packs, it could change the world ~~mannnnn~~ (no hippy).BTW, are you still planning to grow shrooms? Unless you want to do it to enjoy the experience, it is pretty cool to see your first shrooms grow, it might be better to buy 4-AcO-DMT. It will probably give you the same or a very similar experience, and will also better allow you to control the dosage, since the alkaloid content of shrooms can vary a lot.
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/4-AcO-DMT
It's been very well received, people on Zokle who tried it loved it. I think I remember Gun Lover writing very highly about it, how he now considered it his favorite psychedelic or the one he recommended for everyone's first psychedelic experience. There's a distinct difference in the experience between the LSD and psilocin families, I'd love to know what differences you experience and what you prefer about each one. Even compared to high dose LSD trips, you may be in a for a very pleasant surprise
McKenna described the differences between the hallucinations produced by LSD and psilocybin like this:
“An acid hallucination is a little fan-shaped thing … blips back and forth.
… a psilocybin hallucination is MGM Grand. …
Probably an exaggeration, but I think I have read many people reporting that they don't have very significant hallucinations on LSD, it being more of an introspective psychoanalytical experience. Even if you think the visuals you've had are pretty strong, it could simply push it even further than that.
Yeah, gonna do it one day but probably not in the immediate future. I'll pick up some 4-AcO-DMT before then because no point waiting on something that could be good. From what I've heard/read though I'm not sure I'll enjoy the psilocybin experience more than LSD, the characterization I've gotten is that LSD is more abstract, less "earthy" which is a positive IMO. The LSD experience, when it becomes intense enough that you're functionally totally detached from reality, is fun because it's so different than you experience day to day. Colors you never actually see, patterns that have no connection to anything physical, interacting with the conceptual embodiment of abstract ideas. I remember thinking at one point that I was "swimming in the electron flow of an adder circuit" which is of course pretty meaningless on its own but the point is that the subject of the experience is something with no previously reified physical association, which it sounds like something that doesn't happen on psilocybin trips. But then what the fuck do I know, I've never done it so I'll give it a go, not like I really stand to lose anything. -
2015-09-24 at 4:35 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Lanny, what have you used/been using to purchase Bitcoin?
Used coin.mx until it bit the big one. Haven't signed up for a replacement yet but I'm going to have to since I'm going to make a sizable (at least relative to my usual volumes) purchase of etizolam soon to keep on hand. Going to buy powder, dissolve it into a fluid for volumetric dosing, and shelve 90% of it -
2015-09-23 at 5:31 PM UTC in Freedom or Security
There would have to be a strictly divisive nature about it, even if you go down both roads. It's like, we can't have the best of both worlds, no matter which direction we take. So, in that case, I'd rather be responsible for the bad things which will ultimately happen to me either way, than have somebody else be responsible for what happens to me. It's not really about wanting to be divisive just for the sake of being divisive, it's just owning your own life and what happens to you, and how you get to react to the world, not someone else reacting for you.
But you have to demonstrate more than just "neither (presumably you mean the left/right or security/freedom dichotomy) is perfect". You have to show how decentralized security responsibility is better than other imperfect alternatives. In particular decentralization precludes certain people from security and lacks the economy of scale that a professional police force can take advantage of. Also there's no accounting in such a system for justice. Normal libertarians can handwave with some bullshit about "people can take care of eachother" or something but you've already cut off that avenue by proposing we need person-lethal-force in the first place. -
2015-09-23 at 5:26 PM UTC in What Games Are You Currently PlayingMostly killing floor 1. I need to finish the witcher 3, great game, I just have this thing with games that have long storylines, I don't want them to end so I stop playing when I'm closing in on the end. It's retarded because it's not as fun when I come back to it later, if I do at all, but it's just how my brain works I guess.
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2015-09-23 at 5:05 PM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Rizzo sent IWD's gigantic meth posts to the University that IWD was going to attend, and got his application denied as a result and had to settle for online college instead.
That's the story I've heard too, but is it really true? Like I kinda doubt a university could even find someone's application by name for discrimination concerns, and even if they could I don't think they would really give a shit about some methposting (or be able to verify the posts in question were actually authored by the proposed applicant).
I don't know man, smells fishy to me -
2015-09-23 at 6:59 AM UTC in Do you day dream?
I daydream about blowing my brains out constantly. Not in an edgy way, just because it makes me feel less depressed.
I totally get that. Like when I remember something embarrassing I did as a kid or think of something particularly unpleasant I have this automatic reaction where I think about killing myself or getting shot exactly where I'm standing at the moment and just collapsing on the floor in an instant. Like I can somehow tap into the don't-give-a-fuck mindset of not existing by envisioning it in enough detail. I'm trying to do it less these days since I think it's how you end up with repressed memories and that can't be good but it's definitely something I think about at times.
My most common daydream is falling though. Like down the side of a building, being in some control of the motion, just the change of orientation. Never hitting the ground or dying, just the mental exercise of continuous reorientation. Whenever I'm really focused on something difficult the sensation is similar, like when I'm working on a hard problem and making progress it feels distinctly like falling, reorienting, change of gravity. I find thinking about it in idle moments makes the process "in the field" more productive, more fun, easier to deal with. Like in your day to day your mental centroid, the place you think of "yourself" as being, is like the center of your head. But when falling, or experiencing unexpected torsion or acceleration, it changes to a different point, like where it would have been a moment ago. For me the process of learning or reinterpreting previous experiences is very similar, a departure of the mental centroid from the conceptual origin of vision, it just feels like falling and I daydream about the same sensation a lot.
I think I picked it up when I read Ender's Game ages ago and the eponymous character talked about this, or at least the idea of mentally reorienting yourself in space. I don't know if the experience of it outside of daydreaming happened after I started thinking about it, or if it was something that was there before and I only noticed later but it's definitely an entrenched habit at this point.
Anyway, fantasizing about killing random people sounds kinda unhealthy m8. Like I realize suicide fantasies aren't like the image of mental health but that sounds like some Anders Breivik shit right there blood. -
2015-09-23 at 6:27 AM UTC in plz help with python debuggerNot reading enough of the code to really understand what's going on, try inserting:
from win32con import *
at the top of my_debugger.py, a little googling suggests that constant lives in the win32con module (you'll need the win32 extensions to be installed to import that module, make sure you've done that, if you haven't you can grab the appropriate release here). Try adding that and let us know what the output is. Also like soph said, you'll almost certainly need admin rights to access other processes memory space but that shouldn't produce this particular error. It seems like some versions of ctypes has this constant in it since some people seem to be able to run the code but it's better to use the win32 extensions version even if you could get it out of ctypes because this is, obviously, a win32 specific flag.
As an aside, this is one reason why the `from X import *` pattern is a bad practice, it becomes difficult to identify which library a variable is coming from if you don't use a prefix. While the "import X" syntax is prefered because it forces you to use the canonical form of a library name (making one-liners comprehensible), if you want to save on typing you can do something like `import ctypes as c` and then use things like `c.c_int32`. It's two characters more but it's intelligible to humans with a simple lookup. I realize this is derived from someone else's code so whatever, but it's still a good headsup when doing your own sutff. -
2015-09-23 at 4:56 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
What about recording your voice (smartphone)? Oi, hearing yourself rant on psychedelics could be painful, but there may actually be something there. If there isn't actually any merit to your ideas and it only feels that way because you're under the influence, at least you'll know.
That's a good idea, I'll try it next time. I'm usually better at talking than writing anyway so imaginably that will carry over. I'm sure a good chunk of what I experience is just nonsense or stuff that only makes sense when I'm tripping but some of it is, empirically, gold. I think I wrote once about waking up the day after a trip to GPU code that worked really well which I couldn't have written afterwards. That was the most interesting but I've had several incidents of just jerkoff code I wrote for kicks which tripping (I write random little tidbits now and then without any particular purpose, in any state of mind, they're usually mildly interesting to me but nothing worth writing home about) that ended up being a lot more profound than what I churn out at the dayjob or whatever. And most the time I can't really focus enough or I'm just not at a keyboard to type so a majority of stuff I think of just goes out the window. Don't think I could dictate a program by voice but I could probably word-vomit enough of it to be recognizable on the other side.Bacopa and PRL-8-53 are the best drugs available for enhancing memory. Maybe something for the nicotinic receptors as well, this could have a very positive effect overall effect on cognition and increase the cerebral qualities of the trip. Processing speed and power, memory, sensory gating, possibly some anxiolysis, concentration. I can't remember everything it effects, but I think those are the main things I've mentioned before that nicotine actually seems to be one of the best supported and strongest cognitive enhancers. I took 50mg of this right and am pretty impressed with the effects, definitely above average effects compared to most nootropics: https://newmind.com/sen12333-3058.ht...2333-3058.html
Hmm, I'm not sure, but I may be experiencing a pronounced effect on the perception of time, which could be due to the above factors.
I was taking bacopa when I had my first trip, the one that was the most fun in a traditional sense. No idea if there's a causative relationship there but probably worth trying again since supplements are dirt cheap.The same thing happened to me with a high dose shroom trip. Do you remember my trip report on Zoklet, "What happens when you fight against ego death and take a beating"?
I don't, any chance you have a wayback machine link to it? I'd love to read it, I've definitely had that particular experience and would love to hear what your reaction was.It's really unfortunate because when it occurs it means you're right at the door of an incredibly profound experience. My life could have turned out shockingly different if I had broken through.
Why haven't you tried again? Sure it can be scary or uncomfortable sometimes but it seems like you understand the objective lack of risk and what you stand to gain. It's not like you back out once and can never go back, you know something now that you didn't before. Come join me in exploring the mysteries of the universe or your mind or some shit. It's dumb essentialist thinking like that will fuck up a good trip, no door is closed to you if only you can learn to be unafraid.Of course no one really dies directly from psychedelics, you just have to tell yourself and accept, truly understand and believe, that it's not going to occur, even if it genuinely feels like it, and that feeling this way, this experience, is normal, and the fear will end and be replaced by something wonderful once you break through. Of course it's very difficult to maintain your composure and control, override, your emotions, particularly while under the effects of psychedelics, how they alter your thoughts processes. I'm interested in trying pyrazolam with psychedelics because it may be so selective that you can still have a strong anxiolytic effect while not interfering with the trip. This is why I recommended phenibut, although I remember you told me that while it made the come up much smoother it may not have made much of a difference at the peak due to the intensity, but a higher dose may be able to take care of this.
Yeah, next trip is going to be piracetam and phenibut about an hour before dropping. Ordered more bacopa but as I recall effects aren't really observed until you're deep into a cycle so probably a no-op there. Might be a while though until I try it, my dad's in the hospital and I'm more fucked up over it than I thought I'd be, not the right headspace to trip in. Dissociatives on the other hand... -
2015-09-22 at 7:06 AM UTC in Killing Floor / Killing Floor 2Down, been playing more KF1 than 2 the last couple of weeks, getting into the flow of HoE servers more. Kinda wish they'd stick to the core maps a bit more but I guess most these niggas have been playing since the first standalone release so I can hardly blame them for wanting to branch out.
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2015-09-22 at 7:03 AM UTC in Challenge for Sophie>password protected archive
>implied child porn
I hope you're ready to get v& cuz if there's anything illegal in that file you gonna be getting to know bubba _real_ well -
2015-09-22 at 6:06 AM UTC in What's wrong with my class.just responding to OP cuz.
It's the missing comma on line 9. A tailing comma has no semantic significance in a list. It does in a tuple, but only if the tuple has one item (it's how a tuple is distinguished from parentheses indicating operator precedence)). It's taking line 9 as an expression which is expected to evaluate to a function reference and then calling it on the following tuple. Consider:
def inc(x):
return x: 1
mylist = [(inc)(1)]
`mylist` will be `[2]` (a list with the single member, the value of inc(1), that is 2). -
2015-09-22 at 6 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first editionHow much memantine are you taking these days?
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2015-09-22 at 5:34 AM UTC in Fedoras: Or how I learned to start worrying and became a self-loathing STEM fagP.S. I'm drunk but I think at least some of that made sense
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2015-09-22 at 5:33 AM UTC in Fedoras: Or how I learned to start worrying and became a self-loathing STEM fag
This gave me a chuckle. Also Lan Lan, IDK bro, what's wrong with having respect for someone who's good at something you're trying to get into. I'm going to sound like a dick riding suck up for this but i don't give a shit. I'm getting into programming and i think it's pretty challenging, then when i see what you know about it i think jesus fucking christ i still have so much to learn and Lan knows all this shit and i respect you for that especially since like i said programming is very challenging to me, feel blood?
Also, STEM is bauce, i'm an EE typa nigga' by education and physics is a big part of that, and i mean, understanding the fundamentals of the Universe seems pretty significant to me.
Incidentally i actually have the brain for the humanities and general social things, the subjects just make sense to me and understanding comes natural, they 'click' in a way. But then i think who gives a flying fuck what kind of bullshit people do and think about. How the Universe and the brain in example works is what's interesting and then i think coding is awesome because it's extremely useful in infosec which you know i have an interest in because who doesn't like to pwn noobs and break shit nahmean?
Well there's a distinction here I think. The two mindsets I resent are "computer science(programming) is a way to make lots of money" and "If you're not in a STEM field then you don't matter". The former really drains the quality from the community that made me love it in the first place, the mirth and lust for knowledge that characterizes "hacker" (I could rant about that term but w/e) culture. I guess it's an inevitable consequence of professionalization but when people are only here to collect a paycheck it stops being about the fun weekend projects, subverting expectations, doing something really novel, especially in an economic clementine that encourages the most conservative, derivative steps towards what we basically already have (consider the number of "X killer" startups. If you define yourself as trying to fill someone else's market niche better then you've resigned yourself, categorically, to non-novel work). In practice it also undermines the academic pursuit as well, when you're just looking to make a buck the only possible payout for disseminating a novel discovery is a meager PR boost, whereas in the days of yore (although this is a tradition that persists in the infosec world to some extend) the reputation you earn from doing something new and interesting was worth far more than a possible market edge because people fucking cared about the opinions of their peers and advancing the state of the art rather than making a buck.
And the other side, STEM supremacy, so far as I can tell, comes from a mere ignorance of the humanities. It's really astounding to see, and you can probably do this yourself with people you know, to ask someone who dismisses philosophy as a field about why they feel that way. Within three sentences you'll hear a philosophical claim that has been argued and understood in the western philosophical tradition for hundreds of years, which has nothing to do with any STEM field, and yet will be presented as some knockdown argument against philosophy as a field. People who buy into this anti-humanities rhetoric are so ignorant of what they oppose they don't even realize their argument for their own position are straight out of historical works in the humanities themselves.
So yeah, I mean programming is hard no doubt, I don't mean to trivialize the efforts of the novice, but it's this tiny corner of the universe, a formal system that's important only because we can make circuits to emulate it quickly (a historical accident). If you're going to devote your time to it I think it's worth asking if you want to learn it because it's interesting or if it's a mere means to an end.
Being the guilty-capitalistic cunt that I am I've read probably every essay Paul Graham has written and I remember something he said (although I can't remember the particular essay because I have a block against his bullshit) that I really agree with although I didn't fully understand at the time. He said that to be a good hacker(read: programmer) you had to enjoy the practice of actually programming. He went on to say that you didn't have to enjoy it so much that it's the your first priority all the time, because even the most devoted programmer will prefer to fuck some hot chick or chill on a Hawaiian beach or something at some point, but the important point was that if you had to choose between watching TV or some other mundane thing you can do every day for a quick hit of pleasure and programming, you would choose programming. And I tend to agree with that, I think that's a good litmus test, if you can't enjoy the material act of plying your trade more than something that's constantly available to you then you're probably better off finding something you like more to spend your life on.
Now you personally, Soph, I have high hopes for you. You're on here, you're on stack overflow, you're asking questions and stumbling your way through real projects when you could be watching something or taking drugs or whatever. God knows I cave to the desire to get drunk, eat icecream, and watch shitty slice of life anime sometimes. Programming as a trade may be secondary to your interests in information security but you have something you're willing to invest the time in getting good at and that's a fucking asset like no other. For whatever reason this field is pretty democratic, people are generally willing to share their knowledge with those who are willing to put in the time, so the blocker is caring enough to put in the time and so far you've done pretty damn well at that. I certainly don't think I'm owed any special respect for whatever level of skill I have in this field but it's not people like you who I'm criticizing here, it's people who are drawn to this field because it's a "good job" and who don't have the spine to say "fuck it" and go get a degree in history or something.
Do you remember the poster ond? He had a lot of alts because he got banned a lot. Fascinating person, in a lot of ways, but there was this period where he was basically teaching me programming. This was back when I was in highschool and like my first year of college, I had muddled around with some BS stuff here and there but wasn't anywhere close to a professional level while he had landed a dev job. We had this little project we both worked on, I'd do some stuff, he'd make it better, I'd ask him why and he'd explain. He worked with me for a month or so, we talked on IRC pretty often, and in that time I learned an incredible amount, but the most important thing I learned by far (and which to this day I think many developers don't know) is the self confidence to dive into problems or source code I don't understand with the conviction that I'll come out the other side with enough understanding to do what I want to. To this day I owe my success in academia to him, and my career to a large extend. He was the person who showed me how to either hack it or recognize inevitable defeat in the face of any odds. His instruction showed me that I was cut out for this, something I wan't sure of before.
Anyway I guess my point, besides dickriding one of the most hated niggers in this community, is that there's a certain constitution you need to be good at this particular thing. If you're not that's fine, there are many other things humans can do, many of which are far more important to us as a species, but to find out if this particular corner of the world is the place for you, you have to charge headlong at the hardest problems you find interesting. It doesn't much matter if you succeed or fail, the important question is if when you get to the other side, when you realize if you can solve your problem or not, if you're ready to go another round, to jump back into the fray and get you ass beat again, if you can enjoy the thrill of the chase regardless of where it lands you then you're made of the same stuff that every world class computer scientist, programmer, and hacker ever was. -
2015-09-22 at 4:23 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
I remember the first time I took shrooms I had an unstoppable surge of rapid thoughts, a constant stream of them. Afterward my brain had a very distinct worn out feeling I had never felt before that reminded me a lot of muscle soreness that can occur after intensive physical exercise, lifting weights.
Yeah, almost every trip I've had has left me feeling very mentally tired, often physically too since I tend to move around a lot, tensing muscles or just kinda moving around to see what it feels like.What are your doses usually like? Are you being a pansy and using them gingerly? Any plans to experiment with high dose trips? I'm only joking, I certainly wouldn't fault you for apprehension since I understand what can occur and have rarely tripped due to my experiences having often been negative and being terrified of what my mind may be able to produce. Good idea to build experience and become fully familiar with the level experiences first, but my word can you get fascinating experiences at high level doses and with more potent substances. I'd love to read a detailed trip report by you to know what the experience is generally like for you.
http://www.shroomery.org/9067/What-d...s-Lvl-1-5-mean
The highest dose I've taken is 375ug, lowest 150, the mean is probably a little under 300. My first experience was at 250ug which was probably a little too high for a first time, it happened because I ordered that much but was too much of a pussy to take it for a few weeks and then when I did I forgot how much the quantity was. It was only afterwards that I looked up the quantity but to this day it was the most pleasurable trip I've had.
Based on that link I've had two trips that reached level 5, the rest either 3 or 4, only once have I had an experience that was just I would call just "stoned". The first time I totally lost any sense of time I wasn't ready for it, it got pretty dark, I couldn't really see anything because the hallucination was a more powerful visual signal of what I was looking at. I saw a pyramid made of bones, a kind of abstract pattern that looks like it looks when you press your hand too hard against a plasma monitor (very distinct though, not just any pattern), and teeth, molars, of a child I think. Those three things have been a recurrent theme in every deep trip I've had since. I'm not some new age pussy of course but I'm thinking they tie into a repressed memory somehow, there's definitely a sensation of childhood. In all my memories before being 7 or so the dominant component is confusion, I just remember being confused a lot, and that same kind of confusion is what marks these three themes. In that first super-intense trip I tried to bear with it for a while but ended up freaking out and thought I was dying or something so I took some etizolam to bring it down. I kinda regret doing that because I feel like there was something there I could have figured out if I had stuck with it.
One interesting thing is that while I describe all three of those recurring elements as kind of a visual thing they're not. I'm pretty auditory/non-visual just in the day-to-day and it comes through in that my psychedelic experiences are like that, always words or pre-words and sounds, not particularly visual. Like I see visuals now and then of course, but the dominant mode is auditory. There's actually this one sound that's persistent across the whole experience, it's almost a pair of pure tones but there's something else in it too, like a really low frequency oscillation of the amplitude of both tones. Sounds like something out of a Boards of Canada song. I've tried to synthesize it from memory since it's pretty simple but no dice, probably just a perception I can only have under the influence.
I think I'm going to try piracetam or noopept again. The time I had to take etiz I took piracetam beforehand so I've been kinda weary since but it frustrates me that I tend to forget details, important ideas and stuff. I write stuff down sometimes but when I'm peaking it's hard to even work a pen, what comes out is really only marginally articulate. I think a racetam might help with that recall (the more intense trips I've had with piracetam/noopept are the most vivid in my memory).
re:showering on the comeup, I actually have before. Felt nice but I felt uncomfortably hot for a bit afterwards. Temperature control seems to be kinda wonky in general under the influence of psychedelics but I do think being too hot is better than being too cold. My first trip, at the peak, I curled up under a blanket listening to music and had the distinct sensation of being too hot but it was like when you have a fever, you realize you're uncomfortably warm but you still want to get warmer but not in the unpleasant fever way, I was under the impression my spirit or soul or something was in some kind of purifying fire and it was a kind of tactile pleasantness that I liked. Sometimes worry about overheating though, could probably do some brain damage in the absence of normal homeostatic impulses. -
2015-09-22 at 3:38 AM UTC in Do you use Chrome?Daily reminder null terminated strings were probably the single worst decision in the history of computer programming and Denis Richie's death _almost_ deserved to be ignored in the wake of Jobs biting it for that curse upon the world.
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2015-09-22 at 3:32 AM UTC in WHO'S THAT POKÉMON!?So do these "models" have stage names like other porn actresses or is it generally assumed these are given names?
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2015-09-21 at 5:06 PM UTC in It's 13:37 my time currently.it's 10:04 here, which I take to mean LOOA and I suppose that means it's the best time to write lua scripts or something.
Oh wait, it's 10:05 now. COME ONE EVERYBODY, GET LOOS -
2015-09-21 at 3:28 AM UTC in Freedom or Security
I don't see what the Hobbesian Trap has to do with being able to take care of yourself without needing someone else to do it for you.
Specifically it illustrates why decentralization of security responsibility is a bad idea. The reason I brought it up though was that the idea that we all need to have lethal force usable at personal discretion (as opposed to something like a military which requires some non-personal (usually) decision process to be used) relies on the notion that such "defense" is necessary, this is Hobbes' controversial point. You usually land in the wing nut libertarian camp so it's ironic that on this issue you, like me, accept the Hobbesian premise, you just don't grasp what it implies (that strong central government is necessary as opposed to, as you would believe, that we all just need bigger sticks to defend ourselves from each other)
