Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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    4 days ago

    Man, I didnā€™t even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldnā€™t be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.

    Like, thereā€™s plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and itā€™s not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And ā€œgenerational insolvencyā€ is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.

    But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldnā€™t be taken seriously.

    • maol@awful.systems
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      3 days ago

      Saying theyā€™re dumb and incurious offers almost too much respect. They believe in racial eugenics based on IQ - look at the kind of shit Elon Musk retweets. Scaremongering about fertility is just the way they get to the racial eugenics, while pretending itā€™s a necessity not a choice.

      Edit: and now I see froztbyte said almost the same thing first. Oops

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      3 days ago

      Man, I didnā€™t even know how to react to this nonsense

      same way as other nazis - boop 'em on the nose

      Iā€™d be willing to wager a guess that this fragile little flower has never had a ā€œphysical altercationā€ in their life and would walk away with fucking ~ptsd from a single ā€œhey that shit is not okayā€ boop

      this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious

      if youā€™re talking about eigenrowboat, I donā€™t think I agree. theyā€™re quite curious, but they ā€œjustā€ go in with a particular viewpoint and a desire to ā€œprove their pointā€ in the most prevaricating way possible. itā€™s no accident that the entire sphere of ā€œhow do we make scientific racism and nazism more socially palatableā€ gravitates around these fuckers. if youā€™re instead talking about them making these comments in a ā€œsee the poor are dumb and useless and thus deserve what they getā€, well, see aforementioned shitty opinions

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        3 days ago

        Nah, itā€™s the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think theyā€™re smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that theyā€™re the biggest bestest boys.

        These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because thatā€™s not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time theyā€™ll have more power and itā€™ll work, even though itā€™s the basic underlying shape of Creation that theyā€™re ultimately at war with.