this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 April 2024 (awful.systems)
submitted 7 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

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[–] PMMeYourJerkyRecipes@awful.systems 13 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Scott Aaronson: "Open Letter to Anti-Zionists on Twitter"

Posting here rather than in a separate thread because I'm probably the only one who rememembers him from the old /r/sneerclub days, but he's an endlessly fascinating figure to me - his ability to view literally every possible scenario through the lens of "poor innocent little smol-bean Scott just wants to discuss things rationally, but is persecuted by his ontologically evil foes and their self-righteous dupes" - doesn't matter if it's feminists objecting to his older incel-y posts, Sneer Club dunking on him, cops arresting him for stealing from an airport store or leftists not being fans of the genocide he supports... He must always be the victim. His enemies must always be unreasonable and motivated by hatred of him, specifically.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

And now, maybe, I can at last go back to happier topics, like how to prevent the destruction of the world by AI.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What's he referring to when he says he's most famous for something about confronting radical feminists with his personal issues?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

my god, you missed out on that?

here is way too much background reading!

  • commenter on Shtetl-Optimized talks about the rapey "nice guys" she suffered at college
  • Scott Aa takes this as a brutal personal attack on him
  • Laurie Penny tries to be nice about it
  • Amanda Marcotte? not so nice about it
  • Scott Alexander weighs in with one zillion words, unreadable, so relentlessly awful that Scott demands readers not form an opinion of him based on a thousands of words essay he worked hard on and chose to publish
  • Elizabeth Sandifer with the correct and readable opinion of this bilge (also long, but worth it)
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 13 points 7 months ago

Don't forget how Arthur Chu wrote a response grounded in empathy, and Aaronson decided that Chu wants him dead. Really.

[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

just looked the guy up. He's handsome. He literally looks like Jerry Seinfeld (actually, he looks even more like Pablo Schreiber who played Nicky Sobotka in The Wire). What a god damned twat. (Not that being attractive makes any of his arguments any worse than they already are)

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago

He managed to attract and keep a wife and have kids with her and still talks like the most rancid incel.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The title of the blog ("Shtetl-Optimized") refers to his belief that he would have been happier in a traditional shtetl where the kindly village elders would assign a wife for him.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 7 months ago

Yeah that always gets me, and he picked that name fully knowing what it meant. It isn't like the meaning of it has changed over time. (Like my now unfortunate nickname, which prob gets me tagged nowadays as a rightwinger, due to the weird shit they had with budweiser, and before that it got me tagged at a rabid leftwinger because of 'soy'. Nevermind that it predates all that, and even the bodybuilders/weightlifters misreading the science and causing the whole anti-soy mania, and it is just a reference to 90's shadowrun. I feel this a lot and then I ignore it because I figure most people are not this online to even notice).

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 7 months ago

Holy shit you just sent me down a rabbit hole. How can these people be so terrible. Existing in their spaces must be like constantly smelling faintly a rotting corpse but not being able to quite place where it's coming from.

[–] maol@awful.systems 6 points 7 months ago

commenter on Shtetl-Optimized talks about the rapey “nice guys” she suffered at college

Not just that, but one of very few feminist commenters in an aggressively anti-feminist comments section on a blogpost about how it's wrong that MIT pulled Walter Lewin's online lecture videos after he was accused of sexually harrassing a student. Scott Aaronson, Friend To All Women, felt no need to intervene as his fans trashed the very notion of online sexual harrassment - only when a woman made an uncharitable remark about nerd men.