Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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, and happy 4th July in advance.)

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    The Inside story of Leverage Research

    This should be interesting, it’s about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though it might be a bit too culty. Don’t know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.

    edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.

    Also the Leverage article was meant to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she seems to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:

    I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.

    edit edit: Why can’t these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020