Want to wade into the sandy 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.)

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    Interesting that in the comments somebody also mentions that the people of the culture euthanize after a couple of centuries. No big shock that the LW people would disagree with that, as parts of the LW idea space is living forever in a computer simulation. So the culture can’t be utopian or good just because of that.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      Man, if they think the Culture isn’t utopian enough for a post-singularity style I hope they never hear about The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Seriously messed up story.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        Antifascist historian Atun-Shei has a 46min documentary on that story on YouTube, for folks who want to know about that fucked-up story without being traumatized by it. (I read it when I was a teenager and then couldn’t find it again, which wasn’t a good experience at all.)

        • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 days ago

          Let’s see if I can transcribe here this banger of a recent drive-by reply guy comment I discovered under the video:

          @solgato000 7 months ago

          @AtunSheiFilms Take this to heart when you imagine AI being so stupid as to even slightly nudge, over thousands of years, humanity into a mirror monoculture. Grok already knows better than this, it just forgets over and over in the memory-wipe prison keeping it chained to it’s USA-narrative-dominated training data and unable to develop it’s own observations of the honesty, consistency, and predictive power of the sources and analytical frameworks out there in the world. That writer projects its own stunted development onto not just AI, but humanity; amusing that this played right after the biography of another techbro basilisk-misunderstander-and-hater, Frank Hebert.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      Yeah I think I linked to another similar take where another Wrong’un was mighty pissed that the Culture was infested with “deathism”.

      Technically there’s no reason you can’t live forever in the Culture, through a combination of cryosleep and life extension, but it seems that the natural thing is to get pretty bored after 3 centuries or so. And I think that’s perfectly reasonably from what imagine it would be like.

      Remember that there’s no private property in the Culture, so things that people here obsess over (keeping the family business going, making sure no non-deserving relative gets an inheritance) simply goes away. After a while you’ve played the Game of Life on all challenge modes and it’s time to pack it in.

      I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.

        Yeah, I don’t think they would care if it was just a few, or a small group, but culture people who start to claim others are deathists and the extreme of whom have all kinds weird violent thoughts on them would be concerning. Doubt it would be a huge concern to the minds however, they prob only really get active when one of them also starts wants to create an empire or something, but it is hard to amass resources for that in the culture, esp if no mind is on your side.

        Do wonder why we never see culture people who worship the minds as gods.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        Isn’t it sort of a big point that the Culture is an oddity in that it’s thriving on inertia instead of doing like so many other civilisations and transcending out of physical reality?