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.)
Our Very Good Friends are often likened to Scientology, but have we considered Happy Science and Aum Shinrikyo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
aum:
this is in common with both our very good friends and scientology, but i think happy science is much stupider and more in line with srinivasan's network states, in that it has/is an explicitly far-right political organization built in from day one
Aum is very apt imo given how it recruited stem types.
aum recruited a lot of people, and also failed at some things that would be presumably easier to do safely than what they did
otoh they were also straight up delusional about what they could achieve, including toying with the idea of manufacturing nukes, military gas lasers, and getting and launching Proton rocket. (not exactly grounded for a group of people who couldn't make AK-74s)
they were also more media savvy in that they didn't pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they ~~had entire radio station~~ rented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)
Its pretty telling about Our Good Friends' media savviness that it took an all-consuming AI bubble and plenty of help from friends in high places to break into the mainstream.
And how it fused Buddhism with more Christian religions. Considering how often you heard of old hackers being interested in the former.