Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
It's especially strange because becoming less prone to bias and developing a clear understanding of what serves your interest is so much of the pitch for Rationalism as a community/ideology/project. Like, here's unbearably long essays that promise to help cultivate the superpower of seeing the world clearly and acting in it effectively, now if you acknowledge that nobody outside this small set of group homes is actually doing that you'll be shunned. And that's not getting into how easily exploitable those assumptions of good faith are by bad-faith actors. It comes back to that quote from Scott that has stuck in my head apparently more than it did his: if you build a community based on the principle that you will absolutely never have a witch hunt you will end up living among approximately seven principles civil libertarians and eleven million goddamn witches, and this is true even if you're right that witch hunts are bad.
i think this is exactly why they had to come up with - or rather, misappropriate - the concept of coupled vs decoupled thinking. when they (especially the more, ahem, human biodiversity minded of them) fold ridiculous claims about what constitutes virtuous cognition into scientific and sophisticated sounding terminology, it makes those claims seem aligned with the broader sales pitch of rationalism
also that scott quote is excellent. i hadn't heard that one before
I actually dug up the context to make sure I wasn't forgetting something horrific. It's from a 2017 piece (CW: SSC Link) back before he went mask-off but was firmly in the "I'm a liberal and I talk exclusively about how liberals and their institutions suck" useful idiot phase of his career, so the overall essay is about how actually the wing nuts have a point when they say that all so-called neutral institutions are actually secret communist indoctrinators that want to trans your children and take your guns. I'm paraphrasing, obviously; he believes/pretends that when they called these things left-wing they didn't mean "literally in league with Stalin and the Devil". However, in the middle of the usual beigeness he tries to maintain his air of neutrality by having a section on how bad Voat ended up being, which concludes with: