(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
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.)
Creepy rationalist says the quiet part out loud.
(“RMN” = “Red Means No” = CNC parties = Consensual Non-Consent parties = Pretend sexual assault parties)
EDIT: He elaborates.
Way back in 2008 someone proposed a “project” where women at sci-fi conventions would wear pins indicating whether they were open to random strangers asking them if they could grope them. This caused much angry commentary and suggestions of a “swift kick to the balls” project. That disaster was still…still…somehow more consent conscious than what the Rationalists are doing
That fucking tweet about how “SlutCon is to help men who are scared of women to start liking women, by putting them in proximity to women who like men and aren’t scared of men” is so evil. The implication is that if women criticize an event where women are sexually assaulted and harassed, they are sabotaging an event whose mission is to stop men from
hatingcough being scared of women, and thus it’s their fault if sexism persists. It’s genuinely so evil. That’s all I can sayCishet men who are riddled with anxiety and have honest difficulty navigating social conventions probably need two-truths-and-a-lie icebreaker circles and a Scrabble party or a cooking class, not whatever the blazes Aella is hosting.
But that would just allow men and women to socialize together in a low stakes environment. That wouldn’t reinforce the idea that men are more important than women, and that women can and should do all the work in their relationships. I mean, this is a setup where the women are expected to display much greater competency and maturity than any of the men involved. The women are expected to like men and not be scared of men, and it’s their job to do a bunch of unpaid work in a scenario that revolves around the feelings and experiences of the men, who are not expected to even like women (!)
The whole thing reinforces male privilege - which it’s probably intended to, because Aella has built herselve a cozy home among virulent woman-haters.
Allegation that Aella herself committed sexual assault
I hope that anyone who has been assaulted or abused in these spaces finds support and justice.
The author Wentworth was just awarded half a million dollars by Jaan Tallinn & Dustin Moskovitz to do “research” at Lightcone Infrastructure. I am going to sign out because I am starting to get thoughts which involve the RCAF and 500-pound bombs (so of course they use the middle school across the street as human shields). Rapists, apologists for racists, and protectors of rapists are the enemies of all mankind.
How much of their budget goes towards registering under a novelty TLD?
Also, is ‘MM’ supposed to mean something other than megamega or megamillion? I genuinely can’t work out why you wouldn’t stop at a single M.
I forget which convention it is exactly, but I think it’s the one that goes M(ille), MM(illion) instead of Kilo, Mega…
Roman numerals had MM for million (there was also a convention with writing lines over your numbers).
Is this some fascist RETVRN nonsense then? 🤔
Neoclassicism has been big in the finance industry since the 19trh century to hide that high finance is just arithmetic and personal relationships like buying insurance. A used car dealer can’t afford Ionic columns and a marble desktop, but an investment bank can.
I think many hardened kinksters, who have participated in or made the gear for things I can’t imagine, would have questions about Aella’s parties as described. So its not just those normies are just mindless NPCs following scripts.
John Wentsworth featured in the retracted S.E. Gyges essay.
They get some replies
Didn’t one of Aella’s “studies” into women’s sexuality turn up results that quite a lot of women surveyed had fantasies about being in a submissive role in a relationship or sexual encounter, up to and including aggression? Rationalists would naturally recycle that kind of subjective, context-free nugget of information into proof that most women want men to be dominant and aggressive in real-life flirting or sex. So it follows that it’s fine to approach women this way (though somehow they’re usually approaching leople with less power than them, not say, their boss or their boss’s wife). And if they treat a woman this way and she doesn’t like it then they convince themselves that they still didn’t do anything wrong because they had good reason to believe she would like it. They might even think that she’s just pretending she doesn’t like being spoken to or treated that way because she’s been taught it’s disrespectful.
Some people are into the idea of being so attractive it overpowers others’ self-control. Or, they like to imagine freedom from responsibility—mentally placing themselves in a situation where they cannot be judged for lustfulness. Or both. And hey, no condemnation here.
The idea of a fantasy seems to be too much for Rationalist big brains to handle. I’m sure it can’t be a motivated failure of comprehension, not at all… /s
A fantasy you’re ultimately in control of, versus an unpredictable real life scenario involving people you have to have as coworkers? Surely, they can’t be that different /s
oh gods ew that elaboration. euuughh