Adam ruined his ruination. He truly does ruin everything

Otherwise you’ll end up in a social corner filled with bitterness

This is a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) called a Sneer Club, i.e. people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it.

Joke’s getting a bit tired I think but RE: picture in article: I want to file a CoC(k) complaint

A little more depth. Feel free to read up on the wellness to fascism pipeline in your own time, but here’s an outline of how I understand it:

The concept of wellness begins when the general public is encouraged to care about health. Wellness influencers are soon to follow (consider: Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda. The aerobic gymnastics world championships).

The wellness influencer population balloons during the current age of social media. A lot of them begin parroting conspiracy theories, for good reason! There are real conspiracies with negative health impacts. Consider: Big Ag pushing HFCS. Unfortunately, not all of these influencers are gonna be well read on the science, and someone looking to become fit and healthy is probably more likely to just uncritically listen to models on instagram. So now there is a huge community of people that will uncritically believe conspiracy theories as long as they come from a wellness influencer.

Now, whether by design or accident, far-right conspiracies are sprinkled into this mix. While there is probably already an undercurrent of this*, the situation takes a nosedive during the early stages of the COVID pandemic. There’s a huge explosion of fascist conspiracies, notably the idea that the pandemic was caused by foreigners, causing anti-asian hate crimes to spike. So, where are health-related conspiracies going to propagate most virulently? The wellness community!

So, how do seed oils factor into this? Let’s say you’re someone thinking about becoming healthier. You don’t really know much about health science, and aren’t really trying to fix that situation. One day, you’re on tiktok, getting bombarded by thirst traps, when one day, the algorithm throws a fit thirst trap your way to tell you about one simple trick that will help your heart health: switching from seed oils to beef tallow and butter. Now, you’re not totally stupid, and you know that for some reason, beef tallow and butter are supposed to be kinda bad for you, so you’re a little skeptical. That’s when the influencer tells you that canola oil, one of the most popular and cheapest seed oils, doesn’t come from a real plant- Canola is a portmanteau of “Can” from Canada, where canola oil was developed, and “ola” from “oleum”, latin for oil. That’s right, you heard them: Canola oil was invented in a lab by Big (canadian) Science! A couple more tiktoks and spoonfuls of the naturalistic fallacy later and QAnon themselves is knocking at your door, looking for a place to stay.

*Of course, there is a fascism to wellness pipeline in play as well, though this is a little more straightforward. You can’t look like the master race if you’re unfit. You can’t be pure if you eat processed foods. But also buy these Alex Jones approved nutrient supplements, etc.

It sucks to have to decolonise your darlings. It sucks that a lot of our most enjoyable stories are copaganda. Even the most redeemable stories about cops have probably inspired people to become cops.

I knew R. Scientism. I went to high school with his son. He was a real piece of shit

I started a job in the last year that really forced me to play around with different distros and sometimes building them. Pretty much my entire experience is “abandon ubuntu, just use debian” and wishing other people would do the same

(Pretty much my entire reasoning is that snap fucked up my dev environment so bad I rage installed debian)

Wow, amazing story. Same thing actually happened to a friend of mine

(But srsly, I enjoyed that.)

Non tech-focused AI scam:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/cops-called-after-parents-get-tricked-by-ai-generated-images-of-wonka-like-event/

A story from a couple months ago that I heard about just now from the scam goddess podcast.

Kind of a tangent: to me it seems that there’s a penchant for right wing accusations to be projections of right wing wrongdoing onto other parties. My go to examples would be fake news (should be self explanatory) and corruption (e.g. Soros bucks).

What would the lab leak correspond to? Off the top of my head I might go with the opioid epidemic, if only so that I don’t speak a US originated virus lab leak into existence.

Raytheon: we’re developing a blueprint for evaluating the risk that a large laser-guided missile could aid in someone threatening biology with death

(Ok I know you need to pretend I’m an AI doomer for this sneer but whatever)

Yeah, exactly. My first draft of this included this passage from the post:

If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite. Again, I don’t think I’m discovering anything surprising here, I just want to make this explicit for people who have otherwise just sort of been noticing it on the fringes of their consciousness.

Basically: "Why can't journalists just give nice guys like us a chance?"