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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.)

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[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 20 points 1 day ago

The genocide understander has logged on! Steven Pinker bluechecks thusly:

Having plotted many graphs on "war" and "genocide" in my two books on violence, I closely tracked the definitions, and it's utterly clear that the war in Gaza is a war (e.g., the Uppsala Conflict Program, the gold standard, classifies the Gaza conflict as an "internal armed conflict," i.e., war, not "one-sided violence," i.e., genocide).

You guys! It's totes not genocide if it happens during a war!!

Also, "Having plotted many graphs" lolz.

A crude bar graph. The vertical axis is "Photos with Jeffrey Epstein". Along the horizontal are "Actual Experts" with none and "Steven Pinker" with a tall bar.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Pinker tries not to be a total caricature of himself challenge: profoundly impossible

specifically this caricature:

[-] jax@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

incredible, where is this from?

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago
[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

It is from 2018 (also pre Nathans capitalist class consciousness reveal arc iirc) wonder what Pinker actually said during covid.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Early covid (july 2020) interview:

https://archive.is/Sesfj

charitable take: he has the good sense to not make any major claims about the pandemic, other than to speculate that it would worsen his go-to metric of “extreme poverty”, which is… fine, i guess.

neutral take: nothing extraordinarily damning other than his usual takes.

uncharitable: this is of course early pandemic, so maybe pinker hasn’t found the angle to sell his normal shit with.

Side note: does pinker ever wonder about why extreme poverty has been reduced? I can’t imagine he thinks it’s anything other than liberal democracy and US foreign interference, when the real answer is like, China (a country that Pinker definitely believes is counter to said liberal democracy and the US) continuing to develop economically. Basically i want to him to squirm as he tries and fails to resolve the cognitive dissonance.

[-] jonhendry@iosdev.space 5 points 1 day ago

@blakestacey

“Internal"?

So it's a civil war within Israel?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Jewish people fought back in the ghettos, nazis didnt do a genocide! Ghandi, by not fighting back tricked the Brits into doing a genocide.

What a fucked up broken classification.

E: im also reminded of the 'armed/unarmed' trick american racists pull, when a poc gets killed by the cops suddenly it matters a lot if a weapon shaped object was perhaps nearby. Despite this not being an executable reason for white people who get in touch with the police.

E2: also small annoyance if you track all definitions you should he able to understand that this means that for others who pick a different definition it is a genocide. Hell I can give several definitions of fascism, and if I were to pick a different definition of some group doesnt mean im correct, nor does it make the group less bad. They are still doing war crimes and ethnic cleansings (condemned by all big human rights orgs and the UN). But thanks for scientificly proving it is impossible to disappear into nothing by crawling up your own ass.

E3: A quick skim of the paper, it seems to only talk about genocide accusations towards Israel itself. I expected there to be a long list of European bs accusations of Jewish genocide. But nope, just about the state. (Not saying that some of those accusations aren't antisemitic, because there have certainly been people who used the state as a motte/bailey for their antisemitism).

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 23 hours ago

Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV: "This is genocide! The systematic extermination of all life on Arrakis!"

Pinker emerges from a sietch water basin "Achtually, while using the juice of Sapho I shape rotated many graphs and ..."

this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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