From iSteve commenter GeologyAnonMk2Mod0:

I love the Coen brother’s films. Dialogue is perfect.

Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski (set during the Gulf War of 1991) mentions ‘ragheads trying to find reverse on a soviet tank’ — that sounds like maybe a throwaway line but it shows a ridiculous level of research.

T-72 tanks onwards have only 1 reverse gear, and it’s got a fucking huge gear ratio. It’s really just made for unsticking the tank if you’ve driven into something and gotten bogged down, if you floored it open terrain you would get, at most, about 2.5 mph going flat-out in reverse. Compare that to an abrams which despite being MUCH heavier, can make 25-30 mph in reverse, having 2 reverse gears of much smaller gear ratios. Likewise, a M1 turret takes about 9 seconds to rotate 360 degrees, whereas a T-72 takes more than twice as long. In the war Walter is predicting here, M1s commonly used the tactic of rolling up unto a berm, skylining themselves but using their much faster turret traverse speed to acquire and destroy a T-72, then slam into reverse and jump back down the berm before surviving T-72s could draw a bead on the Abrams, basically leveraging the reverse speed and turret rotation speed of the Abrams as the key tactical advantages of the vehicle over the T-72, more than the DU Sabots or whiz-bang targetting system or composite Chobham armor. Faced with these style attacks, an inexperienced Iraqi crew might order reverse and be alarmed to discover they were being outpaced by ambling goats retreating in the same direction.

The abysmal reverse speed of Soviet tanks has been demonstrated amply in Ukraine on both sides. Whenever T-72s / T-80s etc run into complex ambushes, they do a U-turn instead of reversing, even though this makes them drive through unploughed lanes and basically doubles their risk of hitting a mine. Even with that, it’s safer than crawling backwards at 2 mph while sucking up RPG and AGTM fire. That’s also how you can tell if Nato or Soviet equipment was used in a failed Ukrainian assault just by looking at the battlefield after. If it’s a single track of beaten ground in and out, with the destroyed vehicles sort of clustered in a bundle together, they were using Western gear. If their is a big U shaped swath of flattened grass with burnt out hulks equally spaced along it, they were using Soviet gear.

Pretty remarkable level of research for just a throwaway comment that like 1% of the audience would smirk at.

I’m a huge admirer of the Coens’ writing, but that sounds more like something that John Milius would know if he were called in to punch up Walter Sobchak’s dialogue with facts only he and John Milius would know.

And then GeologyAnonMk2Mod0 speculates wildly on why it seems likely that today’s sports heroes, such as jocks frequently lauded at iSteve, are making use of PEDs, but, then again, they aren’t as flagrant about it as during the Steroid Era of a few decades ago.

I wonder if there is a doping / PED cycle in terms of white relevance in speed/power-centric sports or positions dominated by black players.

Like the big home run bonanza around the turn of the century, which as I recall was pretty evenly represented between whites and blacks although I’m not a big baseball watcher. Was their some change in the available PEDs or testing regime or someone figured out a way to more easily cheat on it? And then when free Testosterone is equalized between the players a lot of the more obvious racial differences sort of disappear maybe?

The latest craze is SARMs, Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators. I think they were originally discovered during research into osteoporosis treatments, maybe 20 years ago, perhaps longer, but really started catching on in the last 5 years and are now more or less ubiquitous in the lifting scene and I would assume organized sports as well, on any level above middle school.

They are rather clever drugs. Instead of just dumping a ton of androgenizing hormone ‘upstream’ and flooding the body with it, like a regular anabolic steroid, these are keyed to specific androgen receptors, like those in skeletal muscle, say, or in bones or connective tissue. It causes the number of receptor sites at the targeted body system to increase drastically so instead of having an above-baseline increase in testosterone, the body both uses testosterone far more efficiently, and it is partitioned preferentially into whatever system is being targeted. So it avoids the hair loss, gynomastia, aggression issues etc that are hallmarks of regular anabolic steroids due to the very precise application.

They are also impossible to test for, as no external hormones are being introduced. There are a plethora of them out now, with the most common ones being (I’ll let you do your own research for the specific drug names) basically an HGH equivalent (AFAIK this was the first one discovered and isolated), a tren/dynabol proxy, and another one which somehow manipulates the receptors downstream to signal the testes to produce more of the user’s own natural testosterone.

It’s important to note that in a direct, raw power sense these produce far less dramatic results than conventional steroids, especially over a short timeframe like, a regular 1-3 month tren cycle. However they are not illegal to own and are cheap and easy to aquire (A 3 month supply of the 3 most popular drugs together would cost about ~$200-300), can’t be detected, and since the androgenizing side effects are minimalized, either aren’t cycled at all or are on much longer 6ish month on 1 month off cycles for the most potent of the drugs.

At least when I was in high school, we had a middling size class of about 300 people, and only 2-3 of the guys were on gear, which is unsurprising given how reckless that is to take during adolescence given the long term side effects and how they are elevated by interactions with regular adolescent body changes. These days, EVERY guy whose mating strategy in any way leverages physique is on these drugs, not just the scholarship-chasing athletes. If you’re a regular gym goer for a long time and noticed that high school kids went from generally being weedy noodle dudes or husky guys dicking around awkwardly with machines to generally looking more and more like experienced amateur body-builders, you’re not crazy, that’s a real phenomenon and the SARMs are why it’s happening.

I had noticed this and talked to a friend of mine who is a competitive powerlifter and he filled me in on the whole thing. I was curious and have dangerously low levels of inhibition and so tried it out 2 years ago for about 9 months, basically 2 four month cycles with a month break in the middle, using sort of the middle of the road dose of these things. I’m in my 30s, and was 5’11”, 145 lb at ~14% body fat starting off, maxing out on bench at maybe 165lb. 9 months later, training 3 times a week for an hour and eating whatever the hell I wanted and drinking unreasonable amounts of beer, I was 178 lb at 7.7% body fat, and had grown a bit less than an inch in height (although that’s hard to precisely measure the delta of) and could rep 245 comfortably. Noticed I was slightly more aggressive and my hair was growing much faster but otherwise no obvious side effects then or two years later after the experiment. So with the most ramshackle gym-bro training and dosing routine and no dietary controls the results were astounding, especially for a middle-aged man. Imagine taking these during growth spurts or your athletic prime generally.

Compared to regular gear, they are slower working, which helps prevent you injuring yourself by your muscles outpacing the ligaments on cycle. I think especially in football propensity to injury in training and games is a big factor in why white players are largely absent in some positions. So that’s huge. And the results are cumulative. You will not have as many active receptor sites off cycle as on cycle, but after taking even one cycle you will have more for the rest of your life at those sites than you did before.

So in terms of the late maturing, slow and steady white speed/power position player, these drugs are like tailor made for that scenario and I would imagine we start seeing a lot more players like this appear as SARMs move from a legal grey area gymbro science thing to a rigorous PED technique.

It wouldn’t be the worst thing if PEDs evolved to be more moderate and, hopefully, safer, while still allowing exciting new marks to be set in terms of American League home runs or total bases–strikeout hybrids that Babe Ruth couldn’t quite match 105 years ago. Back in 1998, it was pretty vulgarly obvious when jocks were winning acclaim by juicing. And not surprisingly, when they finally started testing in 2003, a lot of baseball stars started getting caught.

But if today, pro athletes have a pretty good knowledge of what they can get away with and what they can’t, so the same jocks win as if they were all clean, but fewer players are 0bviously cheating … Well, that’s not the worst imaginable outcome.

Three times per year, I rely on the generosity of my readers to let me keep going rather than getting a real job.

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