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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    18 hours ago

    I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence. […]

    Honestly what he should actually be grateful for is how all his notoriety ever amounted to[1] was a couple of obscure forums going ‘look at this dumb asshole’ and moving on.

    He is an insecure and toxic serial overreactor with shit opinions and a huge unpopular-young-nerd chip on his shoulder, and who comes off as being one mildly concerted troll effort away from a psych ward at all times. And probably not even that, judging from Graham Linehan’s life trajectory.

    [1] besides Siskind using him to broaden his influence on incels and gamer gaters.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      17 hours ago

      While this is close to ‘look at what you made me do territory’. We would sneer a lot less at him if he didn’t blame us for everything. ‘people who sneer made covid worse’ (not the direct quote) for example was just silly, and if you look at the reaction of sneerclub at the time also not in the realm of reality. (But yes he will just say he said sneer by which he didn’t mean sneerclub but people like us in general. Which is obv not a thing I fully agree with, but good motte/bailey).

      It also is interesting, as Scott compared to the others we sneer at never really seems to break containment so to speak. I have seen people talk about Aella on bsky for example, Scott Alexander, Eliezer, lesswrong, EA, etc all come up. But Scott almost never does. (Yes, the ‘untitled’ affair was public, but that was a decade ago, and 6 months before r/sneerclub was created (and long before I joined) and also the whole broaden influence thing as you mentioned). And after all why should he, he is just a random professor, the only reason he is relevant for the broader picture is that he agrees with the AI doom stuff, and he gives the LW people some level of prestige (the only times I have brought him up is because he confirmed that Yarvin spends time personally emailing prestigious people like him but that is about Moldy). He is prob the only one whos sneering is just contained to sneerclub/awful.systems (which is why he should stop reading sc, he prob should also ignore more blog comments and emails (block Yarvin’s email Scott, do it!)).