Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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, 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.

  • jax@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    a near 12,000 word anonymous hit piece on Ɖmile Torres on the EA forum has some gems in the comments.

    the top comment basically calls it out as someone airing their personal grievances.

    next comment feels the need to call out Torres and Gebru are big bad bullies:

    Broadly I think that both Torres and Gebru engage in bullying. They have big accounts and lots of time and will quote tweet anyone who disagrees with them, making the other person seem bad to their huge followings.

    and my personal favorite, that Marxā€™s drive was more akin to rationalists than current leftists, because leftists for the ā€œlast ten-fifteen years just [havenā€™t] been very rationalā€

    Karl Marxā€™s whole work was based on economics and an attempt to create a sort of scientific theory of history, love it or hate it the man obviously had a drive more akin to those of current rationalists than of current leftists.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      I donā€™t think I have seen Gebru do that, or at least not often and when she does she quote tweets people like Stephen King having a bad take. She is way more aggressive about all the various wars and genocides going on in Africa atm which we are all ignoring. You can also see that despite her huge following the actual interactions she gets is pretty low https://x.com/timnitGebru https://xcancel.com/timnitGebru. But lets just ignore reality like how we are ignoring those wars and genocides in Africa. (This last part was sponsored by Gebruā€™s rage vs our inaction and ignorance regarding all these conflicts).

      And it keeps being amazing that the guy who wrote that hitpiece is defending the people behind the grievance studies hoax oddly silent on Lindsay however, I assume that any stalking by Torres was also done vs Lindsay but I guess EA no longer defends innocent conspiracy theory anti-Semites (He has gone so nuts that the other hoax people tried to make him turn it down a bit, but no idea if he stopped).

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        The promptfondlers have learned (by way of multiple public thrashings) not to get into technical arguments with The Parrot Posse, so tedious innuendo about communism and cancel culture is all they have left.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      That piece has been referenced here before, but thanks for diving into the comments. The one about Marx is pretty funny, Iā€™m sure the commenter has only read the Cliff Nots of both Marx and ā€œcurrent leftistsā€.

      • deborah@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        Itā€™s funny how theyā€™ve taken on Marx and Communism as an unmarked Good Person in a weird sort of half troll (remember Musk claiming to be a socialist? to say nothing of Ms. Boucher as a cosplay elf reading the communist manifesto). Itā€™s not quite like American racists and capitalists claiming Dr. King would have Supported Them, Actually, because itā€™s half serious (people like leftism so unfettered wealth acquisition is the real leftism) and half trolling. Theyā€™re trying to get props and have a haha-j/k back door out of the claim at the same time.

        • gerikson@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          I think a big part of Marxā€™ appeal back in the day was that he was fully slotted into the rationalist milieu of the time. Identifying an impersonal, inevitable ā€œmarch of progressā€ that wasnā€™t religious was a powerful idea for some people.

          (btw the Communist Manifesto is 150 years old and could have been written yesterday, at least the first part)

          By all accounts, postwar Soviet union was a pretty sexist and racist place. Itā€™s no wonder the ā€œold guardā€ communists look at todayā€™s blue-haired leftists and sound just like crusty old fascists.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            If you see a reactionary impulse as a desire to go back to an imagined past, the ā€œold guardā€ communists (who mostly didnā€™t seem to have lived under communism) aka the tankies, being similar to crusty old fascists (who also didnā€™t live in a fascist regime, or in the world depicted by 50s americana postcards/commercials) makes a lot of sense.

            • gerikson@awful.systems
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              6 months ago

              Itā€™s ironic that there is a ā€œgood old daysā€ of (state) Communism, seeing that it was supposed to be the end of history.

              (side note, back in HS I saw a graph illustrating the Marxist theory that successive revolutions lifted human civilization up a series of stairs (pastoralism -> city states -> feudalism -> centralized kingdoms -> bourgeois capitalism) up until Communism where these steps became an ascending straight lineā€¦ and I though ā€œhey, why does the line straighten out just there???ā€)

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          Ms. Boucher as a cosplay elf reading the communist manifesto

          Apparently she wasnā€™t reading it, it was a troll, she had borrowed the book for the photo-op. So it is actually worse.