Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question:
The Twitter poll came out 58% blue and right-wing folks are screeching. Here is a bad take. The orange site has a thread where people are rephrasing the prompt in order to make it sound way worse, like giving everybody a gun and then magically making the guns not discharge.
I find it remarkable that not a single dipshit has correctly analyzed the problem. Suppose you are one of Arrow's dictators: your vote tips the scales regardless of which way you go. So, everybody else already voted and they are precisely 50% blue. Either you can vote blue and save everybody or vote red and kill 50% of voters. From that perspective, the pro-red folks are homicidally selfish.
Bonus sneer: since HN couldn't rephrase the problem without magic, let me have a chance. Consider: everybody has some seed food and some rainwater in a barrel. If 50% of people elect to plant their seeds and pool their rainwater in a reservoir then everybody survives; otherwise, only those who selfishly eat their own seed and drink their rainwater will survive. This is a basic referendum on whether we can work together to reduce economic costs and the supposedly-economically-minded conservatives are demonstrating that they would rather be hateful than thrifty.
Picking red guarantees your survival by endangering everyone else, making it morally fucked, but risk-free. Picking blue puts your life at risk, but saves everyone's ass if it pays off, making it the more moral option overall. Picking blue also requires you to put some trust in your fellow man, so I'd have probably picked red if I didn't know how the Twitter poll came out.
Someone else on the orange site claimed the experiment would end with only red-pushers left if it went for multiple rounds. Adding my two cents, the outcome would depend on how the first round goes - if red wins round 1, voting blue looks like suicide, shifting the calculus in red's favour, and if blue wins round 1, you have reason to trust everyone will continue voting blue, making it a lot less risky and shifting the moral calculus in blue's favour.
I didn't see red as risk-free at all. You're setting yourself up for a post-button Mad Max world where you know all of your fellow survivors are willing to kill you and up to 49% of humanity.
I mean, it seems pretty obvious that there's no incentive to change your vote from blue to red once it's been established that blue can win unless your goal is to murder up to 49% of everyone, which is certainly a moral calculus.