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.)
I think it comes down to a deflection of the inherent cruelty of the system. Part of the structure of capitalism is that some people are going to suffer unjustly because your ability to get the resources you need to survive is gated behind your ability to either hold capital or provide value to capitalists. You don’t have to look far to find examples of people who are either physically unable to do so or who find that their proverbial cheese has been moved by economic forces beyond their control or understanding, and now the terms of their economic and social existence are wildly different and less favorable.
By comparison, evolution by natural selection relies on having more children than the environment can support and having a significant number of those children die before they can reproduce. This also creates a lot of suffering, but since it’s a natural process rather than a social construct it’s impossible to call any part of it out for cruelty. There is no exploiter, and so there can be no exploitation. We can feel bad for the slowest gazelle but we don’t morally condemn the lion because the suffering it creates is part of the natural world.
Of course, free market capitalism is not a natural process, there are things that we could do to mitigate or eliminate the suffering it creates, and trying to prevent that from happening is morally reprehensible. This is particularly true if you’re in a relatively privileged position like, say, a finance capitalist in a major startup hub or working in an industry that for various reasons has been given a significantly better deal than most working people. At that point you’re either doing the exploiting or siding with the exploiters and actively perpetuating unnecessary suffering. But if that suffering was natural then it wouldn’t be unnecessary and you wouldn’t be doing anything inarguably wrong.
It’s just Jordan Peterson and his goddamn lobsters again.