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. What a year, huh?)
Clodswarms
Daniel Stenberg has written the cURL bug bounty’s obituary, and discussed his plans for dealing with the slop-nami going forward.
still kinda low-key horrified at Xhitter’s attempt to meme regime change in Iran into existence
https://blog.emojipedia.org/x-expected-to-update-its-iranian-flag-emoji-design/
Look, I fully support the right of the Iranian people to freely decide how to run their country. But assuming that protests that ultimately seem to have ended with over 30,000 dead protestors would succeed and that the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979 is pretty ghoulish.
i don’t think that a washed out royal surrounded by iranian version of cubans from miami would be very consequential, however if you compare scale of political persecution between pahlavi and islamic republic eras, this makes savak look downright humanitarian, and i don’t think he would be able to make situation worse either
also, islamic republic heavily exaggerated pahlavi’s brutality in their propaganda, for example in constitution there’s mention of “60000 martyrs” but even their own revised estimates for 1979 casualties are over 20x lower
Yes, no doubt the Islamic Republic is run by bloody, murderous, dishonest bastards. My argument is that Western options for handling/imposing political will on the situation have always been limited, and are at a particularly low ebb at the moment. Change is coming to both places, but it sadly may not be change that results in greater stability.
the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979
No doubt there is very much real discontent in Iran, but as you note, the heavy involvement of Reza Pahlavi made me raise an eyebrow. Loudly currying favor with the current slate of corrupt/abusive/incompetent Anglosphere governments and media does not suggest judgment that would result in a government any more stable or democratic than the existing one.
And there is, of course, the question of what would become of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially when they saw and assisted in how Iraq played out after de-Ba’athification. The media is still willing to indulge just-so stories about easy imposition of a Western-friendly government, when multiple waves of bloody insurgency have stalled that everywhere it’s been tried. The near-total absence of news from Iraq in the mainstream American media for the last few years fascinates me.
Yeah it’s very quiet now that the media (and Musk) isn’t getting the story they hoped for.
Edit again, I really really wish it hadn’t come to this.
it’s quiet because there’s internet shutdown (19 days today) and iranians allowed to go on twitter only gaslight and emit the most disgusting propaganda you’ve likely seen in a while
if you want to avoid that, you have to either catch iraqi gsm signal from across the border, or use smuggled starlink and hope that neither EW specialist or drone notices you
Also pretty rich how a government (and its plutocrat backers) currently engaged in a campaign of domestic state terror have any standing to whine about other governments
I’m pretty sure he got some tongue-bathing from rich connected overseas Iranians.
Starting this Stubsack off with the latest edition of Product Picnic, which goes into how LLMs have made good product design impossible, and how best to un-fuck the field.
