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. Sorry this wasn’t up earlier, I couldn’t connect to awful.)


Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability https://samoburja.com/ He also has a Substack blog. People call him a sociologist and a political scirentist but he seems (echo me) entirely self-published except for a few opinion pieces and his highest educational credential is “studied at the University of Ljubljana.” The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.
That’s a non-provably non-punchable face if I’ve ever seen one.
I looked at the table of contents of his manuscript and … zero history. All blathering on about some theory he cooked up from first principles to fellate rich people. The fact that anyone takes this seriously is a stunning indictment on the state of humanities education.
If you look at literally page 1 you’ll find the first footnote pointing at another chapter of the same goddamn book and now I’m going to go weep tears of impotent rage.
Ed: sorry, it’s page 8, which is the first page after the self-congratulatory preface.
Hey, gotta pump up these self-citation numbers somehow
Hol up! It’s kind of unfair to blame some poor soul with a PhD in Beowulf for failing the beat the fash out of a determined dickhead over the course of a single quarter. (half serious)
I mean, did Samo even complete a degree?
The other hell site, LinkedIn, says University of Ljubljana but no major / degree listed. maybe he studied with zizek though.
… apparently he’s a second connection. !?
In a quick DuckDuckGo I can’t find any site that claims Samo Burja has a degree.
His concept of live player is just another way of saying that most people are NPCs. The manuscript appears to call Elon Musk an engineer which is like calling Cheops an architect (alternatively, Musk must “fundamentally understand engineering”).