Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 soo 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. Also, happy April Fool’s in advance.)
if you, like me, were wondering what the point of that 25 hour non-filibuster filibuster by Booker was, here’s one potential answer.
Sorry im going to go offtrack here again, I mentioned it on bsky, and got no traction (not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)), but I have some weird leading into conspiratorial questions about the whole thing.
First I heard about this thing is when people said it had gotten 200m likes on tiktok. Which seemed a bit high so I checked, and saw articles say it had gotten 300m. This seems impossibly high. For example, the global K-pop phenomenon ‘Gangam style’ has gotten 5.5B views and 30M likes in 12 years. I have a hard time believing that in 24hs this centrist political debate thing (which are not popular) has gotten 350m (the highest count I saw on a news site) likes.
Which makes me wonder a lot more if tiktok has simply given up on properly counting likes and just is winging it. Esp for larger events. Could be that people just like things instinctively on tiktok (I did check if you could like a thing multiple times, but nope, one account one like it seems). I found the whole thing weird.
That is didn’t do jack shit (apart from giving people hopium about Booker, while it seemingly being his way of avoiding responsibilities) is the cherry on top.
I’m noticing my confusion.It is fucking weird.I agree, or at least anyone thinking critically. I think that anyone would agree that the speech was, as you said, hopium. He’s giving braindead dem voters what they want: a nice, tall, liberal man who looks like he is resisting the reds. Expect him to run for the democratic nomination in 2028, assuming the trump presidency lets an election happen.
RE: view counts. Most charitably, maybe it’s 300m views aggregated across different sources. Neutrally, I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if tiktok, or any other social media platform was manipulating view counts. Least charitably, someone probably asked an LLM for the view counts and just took the answer because people are fucking stupid
No it was 350m likes, not views. That is why im so confused. even at an high rate of 1 in 10 people liking it, it is just so large I’m confused.
“How about a source senator?” another source on hopium, not noticing that in no world do those numbers align properly. “since amassed over 700,000 followers. … It garnered over 350 million likes, with over 150,000 active viewers at the tail end …”
Are you telling me it’s improbable that the equivalent of every single American and then some liked that video?
I mentioned this on bsky and somebody went ‘well it was very popular all over the world’, and I, the weird european who focuses too much on the US politics had not even heard of it. So I just had a few alarm bells going off. But yeah, lets say 1 in 5 people like it, that is a casual 1.7 billion viewers. Large part of the worlds population joined in.
As a Canadian I knew it was happening, but I never tuned in or anything like that.
OH. so two things.
*Please fact check this arithmetic. I have run out of motivation, in general
Edit #100: I jumped on said stream to see how it was going. Floating around 100, but hitting maybe 10k likes per hour. Apparently the booker stream hit 170k viewers at the tail end. 350m likes might actually be a little low, the dems need to up their spend on tiktok boosting
That would explain a lot and would remove all my confusion about it. (also makes the number useless and lol at everybody running with it even more then).
oh, cool, I didn’t think I’d learn a new way to hate the “likes” clusterfuck that plagues the internet, but here we are!