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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Sorry this wasnāt up earlier, I couldnāt connect to awful.)
Daniel Faggella has found the old SneerClub and here too
These doofuses never actually think through their thought experiments. Quoting from a dead thread half a year ago, where he was downvoted but not yet identified:
Okay, but first surely he can recognize that humanity is already multicultural and multispecies? Like, in a non-specious sense, weāve incorporated many mammals, birds, plants, fungi, etc. into our daily lives and canāt really separate them out at this point. Sure, thereās some ineffable and beautiful relationship between humans in general which we want to preserve, but before worrying about whether robots should join in, we should first notice that thereās already an expansion of that relationship to include e.g. face mites, and thereās no sense in which face mites are a Worthy Successor to whom we should cede all managerial decisions. (I was gonna say ācatsā, but I know plenty of yāall would rather have a cat in charge than a human, and youāre not wrong.)
Oh no every day sneerclub teaches me about a new guy.
So heās basically arguing that the Borg did nothing wrong (note: the Borg do not actually exist, note #2: the Borg are space fascists).
This isnāt the first time Iāve seen this idea in rationalist circles: that is bad / wrong / irrational to be biased in favor of humans and or humans to succeed in particular. Often the idea is taken as obviously true, but I cannot understand it at all.
Like I donāt care if you can make a computer ābetterā than me or less sad than me or less likely to eat an innocent shrimp than me. I am not that computer-- if itās a choice between me and them Iām fighting on team me. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make oneās space in the universe or to āselfishlyā want self-actualization or to want humans to thrive.
I think this particular pattern is another consequence of long-termism in the water supply. Itās easy to disconnect yourself from humanity as a concept when youāre in a space that often assumes that you and everyone you could ever have a personal relationship with are already long dead. The fact that this makes it easy to ignore the problems that people today are having in front of your face is purely coincidental.
Iāve been aware of Faggella for a while (entirely against my will) heās got an interview with Yud on his podcast which contains this all-timer quote:
daniel self-flagella, more like
for frame of reference, this is the kind of stuff he tweets