Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024
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.
New for him, I'd wager, but I think ESR is treading a well-worn path: i.e. a huge weirdo gets himself in trouble but then finds favor with terrible people, and ultimately suffers from audience capture.
Edit: I was wrong, it's not new (hat tip to @Soyweiser)
@dgerard@o7___o7 He was weird and creepy before that (see his attempts to make the Jargon File say that everyone in hackerdom was just like him), but yeah, hoo boy. Him and the LGF guy were prominent cheerleaders for Dick Cheney's wilder fever dreams back in the day. The LGF guy got better, ESR didn't.
@m@dgerard@o7___o7@techtakes Back in 2007 I was a guest of honour at Penguicon. ESR was there and we got talking. As of 2007 he was all-in on all the insane "Eurabia" conspiracy theories and islamophobia. If you'd taken his word salad and substituted "jews" for "muslims" Julius Streicher would have hired him as a columnist in a split second. (That's when I added ESR to my list of "people I will not share a platform with".)
In the very late 90s - so only a year or two after the Good Friday Agreement - he gave a talk in Dublin. The only part I remember was when he went off on his tangent about access to guns being an essential component of a free society and then stood there wondering why he was suddenly being heckled.
I recommend looking it up. I believe it’s a term that has been reclaimed by Black people. Obama referenced it as CPT (in response to some other event) in his 2016 WHC dinner speech.
It goes back to the old "steppin fetchit" racist charicature of the lazy black man, usually either enslaved or formerly enslaved depending on when we're talking.
I think that is a reference to the 'eat 1 cookie now or wait, and get 2 cookies' childrens thing. Racists refer to it often. (This also means the black eat the 1 cookie kids can't build empires bla bla bla).
(when I search for the term on youtube, it instantly gave me a video linking it to cultural degeneracy for example. Really annoying you can't block channels properly. Also the mises institute has a video on it)
(This particular study, if there even is a real study, is infuriating because what it's really measuring is how much you trust a figure of authority to keep their promise. I wonder why black kids would have issues with this!)