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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 2 June 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (14 children)

a near 12,000 word anonymous hit piece on Émile Torres on the EA forum has some gems in the comments.

the top comment basically calls it out as someone airing their personal grievances.

next comment feels the need to call out Torres and Gebru are big bad bullies:

Broadly I think that both Torres and Gebru engage in bullying. They have big accounts and lots of time and will quote tweet anyone who disagrees with them, making the other person seem bad to their huge followings.

and my personal favorite, that Marx's drive was more akin to rationalists than current leftists, because leftists for the "last ten-fifteen years just [haven't] been very rational"

Karl Marx's whole work was based on economics and an attempt to create a sort of scientific theory of history, love it or hate it the man obviously had a drive more akin to those of current rationalists than of current leftists.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (7 children)

That piece has been referenced here before, but thanks for diving into the comments. The one about Marx is pretty funny, I'm sure the commenter has only read the Cliff Nots of both Marx and "current leftists".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It’s funny how they’ve taken on Marx and Communism as an unmarked Good Person in a weird sort of half troll (remember Musk claiming to be a socialist? to say nothing of Ms. Boucher as a cosplay elf reading the communist manifesto). It’s not quite like American racists and capitalists claiming Dr. King would have Supported Them, Actually, because it’s half serious (people like leftism so unfettered wealth acquisition is the real leftism) and half trolling. They’re trying to get props and have a haha-j/k back door out of the claim at the same time.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think a big part of Marx' appeal back in the day was that he was fully slotted into the rationalist milieu of the time. Identifying an impersonal, inevitable "march of progress" that wasn't religious was a powerful idea for some people.

(btw the Communist Manifesto is 150 years old and could have been written yesterday, at least the first part)

By all accounts, postwar Soviet union was a pretty sexist and racist place. It's no wonder the "old guard" communists look at today's blue-haired leftists and sound just like crusty old fascists.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you see a reactionary impulse as a desire to go back to an imagined past, the "old guard" communists (who mostly didn't seem to have lived under communism) aka the tankies, being similar to crusty old fascists (who also didn't live in a fascist regime, or in the world depicted by 50s americana postcards/commercials) makes a lot of sense.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's ironic that there is a "good old days" of (state) Communism, seeing that it was supposed to be the end of history.

(side note, back in HS I saw a graph illustrating the Marxist theory that successive revolutions lifted human civilization up a series of stairs (pastoralism -> city states -> feudalism -> centralized kingdoms -> bourgeois capitalism) up until Communism where these steps became an ascending straight line... and I though "hey, why does the line straighten out just there???")

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

...it was supposed to be the end of history.

They never said which end

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Obviously the arse end.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Ms. Boucher as a cosplay elf reading the communist manifesto

Apparently she wasn't reading it, it was a troll, she had borrowed the book for the photo-op. So it is actually worse.

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