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dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 2 weeks ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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 - 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.

last week's edition

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[–] scruiser@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

That was kind of a nothing post? I think the author is misrepresenting the growth (or at least failing to connect the most important dots) of the lesswrong rationalist by portraying them as a natural evolution of the skeptics movement and not the deliberate cultivation of an audience by Eliezer looking for people to spread his ideology to and by Thiel looking to influence farm and create a cult incubator. And then the post is titled "my falling out with the rationalist", and they write they "wanted to offer a more personal perspective " but they don't actually discuss that much of the personal angle either...

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

The author tends to cull his own social media posts pretty aggressively if they get too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention, and it’s possible there’s more he wanted to say in the blog post but he chickened out at the last minute and self-censored it.

But yeah, it felt like half a post.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

he chickened out at the last minute and self-censored it

You know, on net, the internet would be a better place if more people did this, but I wonder why the author even bothered posting anything at all?

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

I have definitely done this. Written half an essay in the awful.systems comment box, realized I don't know what the fuck I'm saying anymore, and deleted it. I like to tell myself that forcing myself to realize I was being incoherent is enough to justify the costs. I guess if I acknowledge that I don't rely on my online footprint to put food on the table the way the proper blogonauts (we're still doing blogs, right?) do I can understand the incentives against doing that though.

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