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 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 soo 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, itās a pretty decent source of sneers. This monthās contains: āThe First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvinā. In classic Moldbug fashion, itās Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. Iām not going to watch the whole thing, but Iāll try to mine the transcript for sneers.
26:23 ā
Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?
30:17 ā a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? Youāre the cream of the crop.
~2:00:00 ā here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as āoh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchyā and responding by saying ānuh uh, urbit is decentralized.ā Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.
Is he inscrutable/obscurantist on purpose, or is it because he never had a proper humanities education nor an editor?
It has been suggested, either on this site or by people who pop up here a lot, that the idiosyncratic (eg. Fucking Weird) design of hoon and nock was a deliberate attempt to build something akin to cult mysteries, where not just anyone could grasp it and the initiates had powers that the ignorant outsiders would not, etc etc.
Unfortunately, whilst heās clearly not stupid, Yarvin isnāt nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and has ended up producing a load of unwieldy cryptic nonsense that no one can work with. I expect this applies to other things he does, too.
He shares a lot of speaking patterns with obvious cranks. Iāve spent some time listening to people who think theyāve figured out quantum gravity and the way they make little digressions sounds exactly like Yarvin does in this video. Itās not rigorous, but if I didnāt know who Yarvin was before watching this video Iām pretty sure I would have thought ācrankā and quickly clicked away.
This is an fantastic point. I could absolutely see him mailing weird things to a university physics department in an alternate timeline.