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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Habsburgs are good, actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41497419
oh boy, some of the comments there
how to instantly identify someone with a social circle barely stretching past their own nose. and I’d bet there’s some “work = moral” thinking held there, too
followed up by a real winner of a comment:
"dont be surprised that rhetoric is toxic"
mr pot, I have a call for you from mr kettle
Missed this spirited defense of landlords: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41536119
generally my rule is "don't read the comments" and super double triple-mega-bonus so for the orange site, so I only glance-scan through some when I do happen to open comment threads (such as from here)
The sentences these people post, man.
Anyway, it's great that he chose a cryptofascist crank who tries to pass himself off as a communist to show how open minded he is. Damn, you respect Habsburg, Orban and Zizek, let me guess how you feel about Putin.
oh thank fuck I’m not the only one who knows about Zizek. there’s still so many people whose first introduction to leftist thought was The Pervert’s Guide to Film on Netflix or whatever who never went back to check if Zizek was maybe a fucking asshole
I'm still blissfully clueless as to who zizek is
although saying that here now might cause an accidental crash course
I mean, my awareness extends as far as "pure sniff ideology" and basically no context. Definitely heard some extremely bad takes on Ukraine though, which has quickly turned into my number one red flag for "actually pretty okay with Nazis when you get down to it"
EDIT: special thanks to skillissuer below for the correction re: Ukraine takes. Please trust his actual sources over my half-remembered reddit nonsense.
my bias against self-described hegelians is reinforced, bonus points for lacanism. every single one i've heard of in some detail (not that i'm looking for them) turns out to be a crank in some capacity. n=3
wait wdym as extremely bad takes on ukraine, because some of these i've been able to find before going to darknet (second page of startpage search results) seem rather sane
https://www.instagram.com/slavojzizeks/p/C8g0yYRvLFL/
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/08/ukraine-must-go-to-war-with-itself
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/21/pacificsm-is-the-wrong-response-to-the-war-in-ukraine
...huh. Your sources are certainly more credible than my half-remembered reddit posts. I think I was probably mistaken on this one.
Basing my opinions on who seems nice or not. I'm visualizing a very angry Taleb shouting about how these assholes learned nothing from him.
Maybe it's because I've started reading a book about Germany and Austro-Hungary in WW1 (Ring of Steel) but I've suddenly started pattern-matching a bunch of pro A-H comments in HN. "It was a peaceful multi-national nation" well yeah until they pointlessly insisted on invading Serbia (and fucking that up twice before being bailed out by Germany) thus setting of the wider war. And when refugees from Galicia had to flee the Russians they were not happily accepted by the rest of the Empire.
Anyway, A-H was teetering on the edge before WW1 and signed their own death warrant willingly.
As always in HN you can find links to new horrifying examples of fascism: https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/06/17/the-foundationalist-manifesto-the-politics-of-future-past/
I guess if we're doing the rise of fascism again it's inevitable that we're doing fucking austro-hungarian empire discourse again. somehow the 1940s returned
We need a high-quality Guards! Guards! movie so that monarchists can be given the Clockwork Orange treatment with it.
Jesus Christ that was the most on-the-nose distillation of tech fascism that I've ever seen. Can't wait for the book to get published and see Elon et al endorsing it.