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 you’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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
It is the not totally bad idea that you understand a different perspective if you can reliably write pieces of text in such a way that somebody from that perspective cannot tell you don’t hold that ideological position.
It fails pretty quickly when tribalism comes into play (aka do it a few times, conclude ‘our side is better at passing this test, so we are better’, ideologies being broad and people not always realizing which ideology they really are in/differences in definitions. And other issues like it is just a bit of intellectual masturbation, depending on finding neutral people of that perspective. ‘you failed the intellectual turing test so we can ignore your criticism of our side’. ‘You would fail an intellectual turing test so we can ignore you’. It being debate bro culture with extra steps. People are not actually interested in the test but use the test as an argument to bash people (you once failed at detecting sarcasm and misattributed a sarcastic joke from a leftwinger to the far right? This shows the entire left fails the intellectual turing test and should not be listened to). etc etc. /rant
Somehow that’s even dumber than I thought. Especially given the amount of actual political discourse taking the form of “can you believe the woke left wants to allow doctors to trans your children at the age of 3 months!”
Could some of these people write a compelling pro-trans argument? Probably, given that their exaggerations are absurd, nonsensical , and/or contradictory on their face and that the pro-trans arguments are generally rooted in basic respect for people’s autonomy over their own bodies. But that doesn’t stop them from lying about what trans people actually want in order to gain political power by stoking the right’s identitarian outrage.
Depends on who you mean with ‘those people’ I think the people of themotte woudl have a lot of trouble writing a pro trans argument for example. Esp as the people in there who are leftwingers (or pretend to be) tend to be anti trans, and there is also a big tendency for them to not understand basic leftwing ideas. That one leftwinger (forgot their name for now they had some number in their name) who kept engaging there, got a few complaints they kept reexplaining the same stuff.
Yeah, if you keep ignoring the explanations and misrepresenting people, they will have to do that. (or quit).