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.
Unfortunately, in the spring of 2020, the CDC was discouraging people from wearing masks, and was saying masking would do more harm than good:
I pretty clearly remember the mainstream media and various liberal talking heads telling people not to mask up back then - mostly because the US was completely unprepared for a pandemic, and they thought they had to discourage people from buying masks to make sure hospitals would have enough.
Meanwhile, the right-wing prepper types were breaking out the N95 masks they'd stockpiled for a pandemic, warning each other COVID was much more contagious and lethal than the government wanted to admit, passing around conspiracy theories about millions of deaths in China covered up by the CCP, and patting themselves on the back for stockpiling masks before the government took them off the shelf.
Then some analyst told Trump that letting COVID spread unchecked would hurt blue states worse than red states, so he had Fox News start anti-masking talking points, and all those conservative foot soldiers put away their masks and became super spreaders for Jesus.
But yeah. During that period from like January to March 2020, the political division around COVID was basically the opposite of what it became, and I can easily believe some "rationalists" were calling bullshit on the CDC suddenly telling people not to buy masks.
This included Scott ssc btw. Who also claimed that stopping smoking helped against cov. Not that he had any proof (the medical science at the time even falsely (it came out later) claimed smoking helped agains covid). But only the CDC gets judged, not the ingroup.
And other Scott blamed people who sneer for making covid worse. (While at sneerclub we were going, take this seriously and wear a mask).
So annoying Rationalists are trying to spin this into a win for themselves. (They also were not early, their warnings matched the warnings of the WHO, looked into the timelines last time this was talked about).
That's how I remember it too. Also the context about conserving N95 masks always feels like it gets lost. Like, predictably so and I think there's definitely room to criticize the CDC's messaging and handling there, but the actual facts here aren't as absurd as the current fight would imply. The argument was:
I think later research cast some doubt on point 1, but 2-4 are still pretty solid given the circumstances that we (collectively) found ourselves in.