this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

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[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (45 children)

hahahaha happy garbage day everybody

The logs also show Ms Power claiming that "the social disapproval for ‘racism’ is a psyop to stop people realising that there are alien and fairy races", and that "black and white were alien races and very different".

wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, it’d kind of make sense if the people I’ve known who just causally slipped “by the way fairies are real” into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didn’t pick up on

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (10 children)

I know someone who's a practicing christian and has said they've seen angels

technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have .... not pushed matters

(e: not claiming this person I reference is racist, more that I've heard some really fucking kooky shit in many spectra, so I don't know how much of a heuristic that sort of thing is by itself. the fairies thing may be a bit more concrete/direct - gonna have to try test it on some flaming racists sometime)

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago (9 children)

I think the connection isn't with belief in the supernatural, but with the specific belief that there are things around us that look like people but aren't people. I can easily see how the latter at minimum makes one very susceptible for racism.

If people start believing that androids are a real thing (not the OS, human like robots), it's only a matter of time before people will be accused of being androids.

[–] hirvox@mastodon.online 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] cstross@wandering.shop 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

@hirvox @mountainriver @froztbyte Like a lot of other things that were funny in the late 80s and early 90s, the NPC meme has lost its shine …

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

agreed, far too much chan shittery attached to it

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I thought that was Hirvox point, that the NPC meme now goes hand in hand with Chan shittery because the NPC meme allows for an easy format to say that other people are not real people. With the added bonus of a built-in "just joking" defence.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I see echoes of it when idiots discuss ChatGPT being AGI - “it’s at the level of the average (dumb) human, so it’s AGI”. Implicit is that the average human isn’t just not intelligent, but unaware of reality in a way that makes them like NPCs in computer games.

—-

Edit here’s an example, no source because I don’t want to start a dogpile.

If you concede that there exist humans that are bullshit in the same way that ChatGPT is, then I don’t think that argument against ChatGPT’s sentience is gonna be particularly persuasive either.

If you say “ChatGPT doesn’t actually think” and later on, “and some humans don’t either” - that weakens the strength of the first assertion by a lot, imo.

I mean, if ChatGPT is only sentient to the degree that the least sentient (conscious) human is, then we’re still talking about AGI.

[–] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

If you concede that there exist humans that are bullshit in the same way that ChatGPT is

If you concede that cats are made of marmalade and always win Texas Hold 'Em games, then I don't think the argument against squaring the circle holds up.

[–] hirvox@mastodon.online 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@mountainriver @froztbyte Yes, and if confronted the memelord can retreat into the more palatable-in-polite-company form of “they just repeat what they’re told _as if_ they were reprogrammable and without any individual thought”. And _clearly_ the confronter is one of them, because they didn’t recognize this important nuance, thus proving the point.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

such people are not much different from movie sharks: you boop ‘em on the nose to make them go away

[–] hirvox@mastodon.online 3 points 1 week ago

@cstross @mountainriver @froztbyte What's old is new again. I hear even phrenology is making a comeback.

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