Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. What a year, huh?)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    9 hours ago

    For example, I think Yudkowsky looks worse now than he did before. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the worst we knew prior to fhis was that the Singularity Institute had accepted money from a foundation that Epstein controlled. On 19 October 2016, Epstein’s Wikipedia bio gets to sex crimes in sentence three. And the “Solicitation of prostitution” section includes this:

    In June 2008, after pleading guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14,[27] Epstein began serving an 18-month sentence. He served 13 months, and upon release became a registered sex offender.[3][28] There is widespread controversy and suspicion that Epstein got off lightly.[29]

    At this point, I don’t care if John Brockman dismissed Epstein’s crimes as an overblown peccadillo when he introduced you.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      8 hours ago

      Yes, in the 2016 emails Yudkowsky hints that he knows Epstein has a reputation for pursuing underage girls and would still like his money. We don’t know what he knew about Epstein in 2009, but he sure seemed to know that something was wrong with the man in 2016. And that makes it harder to put Yud’s writings about the age of consent in a good light (hard to believe that he was just thinking of a sixteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old, and had never imagined a middle-aged man assaulting fourteen-year-olds).