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Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

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[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 5 months ago

hahahaha happy garbage day everybody

The logs also show Ms Power claiming that "the social disapproval for ‘racism’ is a psyop to stop people realising that there are alien and fairy races", and that "black and white were alien races and very different".

wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, it’d kind of make sense if the people I’ve known who just causally slipped “by the way fairies are real” into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didn’t pick up on

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

one day I'll find a way to shoehorn our experience with a Waldorf School into a sneer.

In summary, fairy-themed fascism can be tied back into the whole Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, esoteric Hitlerism shtick. You most commonly get ambushed with it when dealing with fallen hippies, but it is diffusing into the wider online right via weird 4chan things.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 5 months ago

see also all the TERFs yesterday loudly coming out in support of Power and her Nazi revelation

the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway, or perhaps just walking over to the other side of the same room

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 5 months ago

the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway,

It is funny how mad TERFs get when you mention they are saying the same things as neo-nazis, and then a few days later another TERF who is also a natzi is revealed again.

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 5 months ago

the original recipe nazis were deep into occultism so maybe

[-] jonhendry@iosdev.space 8 points 5 months ago

@self

This is one of those David Icke things where you’re not sure if reptilians/fairies/aliens mean reptilians/fairies/aliens or if they're some kind of code or euphemism.

[-] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 10 points 5 months ago

If you always bet on "everything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black people", you will beat the house. Canadians, lizards, trans people, common punctuation marks, apparently also the seelie court I guess.

[-] self@awful.systems 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

having unfortunately known several David Icke fans: it’s always veiled antisemitism, and the veil gradually disappears the more you let them talk

e: yes, the area I live in is teeming with various flavors of conspiracy nut, why do you ask

[-] mpk@awful.systems 9 points 5 months ago

I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 5 months ago

"ah ah but he wrote books - that surely can't be the works of a person frothing in racism!" is something I've heard from a surprising number of people I've met

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 5 months ago

if racism made people illiterate every facebook group and every youtube comment section would look completely different

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

the answer is "both"

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I know someone who's a practicing christian and has said they've seen angels

technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have .... not pushed matters

(e: not claiming this person I reference is racist, more that I've heard some really fucking kooky shit in many spectra, so I don't know how much of a heuristic that sort of thing is by itself. the fairies thing may be a bit more concrete/direct - gonna have to try test it on some flaming racists sometime)

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

I think the connection isn't with belief in the supernatural, but with the specific belief that there are things around us that look like people but aren't people. I can easily see how the latter at minimum makes one very susceptible for racism.

If people start believing that androids are a real thing (not the OS, human like robots), it's only a matter of time before people will be accused of being androids.

[-] hirvox@mastodon.online 4 points 5 months ago
[-] cstross@wandering.shop 6 points 5 months ago

@hirvox @mountainriver @froztbyte Like a lot of other things that were funny in the late 80s and early 90s, the NPC meme has lost its shine …

[-] hirvox@mastodon.online 4 points 5 months ago

@cstross @mountainriver @froztbyte What's old is new again. I hear even phrenology is making a comeback.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 5 months ago

agreed, far too much chan shittery attached to it

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago

I thought that was Hirvox point, that the NPC meme now goes hand in hand with Chan shittery because the NPC meme allows for an easy format to say that other people are not real people. With the added bonus of a built-in "just joking" defence.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I see echoes of it when idiots discuss ChatGPT being AGI - “it’s at the level of the average (dumb) human, so it’s AGI”. Implicit is that the average human isn’t just not intelligent, but unaware of reality in a way that makes them like NPCs in computer games.

—-

Edit here’s an example, no source because I don’t want to start a dogpile.

If you concede that there exist humans that are bullshit in the same way that ChatGPT is, then I don’t think that argument against ChatGPT’s sentience is gonna be particularly persuasive either.

If you say “ChatGPT doesn’t actually think” and later on, “and some humans don’t either” - that weakens the strength of the first assertion by a lot, imo.

I mean, if ChatGPT is only sentient to the degree that the least sentient (conscious) human is, then we’re still talking about AGI.

[-] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 9 points 5 months ago

If you concede that there exist humans that are bullshit in the same way that ChatGPT is

If you concede that cats are made of marmalade and always win Texas Hold 'Em games, then I don't think the argument against squaring the circle holds up.

[-] hirvox@mastodon.online 8 points 5 months ago

@mountainriver @froztbyte Yes, and if confronted the memelord can retreat into the more palatable-in-polite-company form of “they just repeat what they’re told _as if_ they were reprogrammable and without any individual thought”. And _clearly_ the confronter is one of them, because they didn’t recognize this important nuance, thus proving the point.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

such people are not much different from movie sharks: you boop ‘em on the nose to make them go away

[-] jonhendry@iosdev.space 6 points 5 months ago

@self

Have to wonder what happened to her brain since the days when she had stuff published at the Guardian.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago

given some of the other things I've seen from the guardian, not sure that would've necessarily been a contraindicator

[-] jonhendry@iosdev.space 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

@froztbyte

I mean they didn't seem very fashy at first. The later ones (2018, when she was fashy on the down-low ) started to get TERFy but earlier (2010-2014) it was all "the police aren't your friend” and stuff about government trying to restrict the right to protest, etc.

(I looked over her Guardian contributions after reading about the bankruptcy etc in this thread.)

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 5 months ago

I guess that is the same duration/timeline as the guardian downslope arc

[-] jonhendry@iosdev.space 3 points 5 months ago

@froztbyte

The guardian is kind of irrelevant to what I was getting at.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 5 months ago

she had a piece in The Quietus in 2018, but by 2020 they had kicked a writer out for being pals with DC Miller, her co-plaintiff in this case

(just for confusion one of the Quietus guys is a different Luke Turner)

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 5 months ago

causally slipped “by the way fairies are real”

wait, what? What sort of context? Multiple people? FFS TELL

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 5 months ago

so I think I must just have one of those faces cause it’s been something that multiple former friends have revealed to me, and it’s usually a weird show of trust? and it’s always something like “you know, I just think fairies must be real, like they’ve got to be out there? you know?”

and in all cases I’ve gone “…oh that’s cool” and mentally earmarked that person as “do not trust with heavy machinery”

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 5 months ago

just remembered someone i met decades ago going on and on about spiritualism and ESP and just happened to drop in their own massive racism, there's definitely a type

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 5 months ago

The crystals to anti-vaxx to full-blown fascism pipeline is real and I have more than a few cousins deep in that KKK hole. Hate to be a science brodude, but all the spiritualism stuff can be a gullibility magnet for those prone to self radicalisation (the bad type)

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

yeah i have one of those faces too (tall, blue eyes, Danish cheekbones), disconcerting number of nazis who wanted me to be in with them

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

I get the club invite most times I speak afrikaans in pretoria

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

in australia the club invite is just a way of saying "hi" to your fellow white person

[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 10 points 5 months ago

I've never had the full on "let's be nazis together" invite but I've had several people launch unprompted into "now that it's just us white folks we can talk for real" mode. internally they must have been like "I see white skin, we are clear for takeoff, 54321"

funnily enough it hasn't happened since I became visibly trans

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago

ja that can happen/s here too

presumably your bones comprehend all the non-weather reasons that .au is such a popular za expat destination

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

those particular south africans apparently made perth in particular a fucking delight of genteel racism in the late 90s

tho they didn't particularly change the nature of it

[-] jonhendry@iosdev.space 8 points 5 months ago

@dgerard

Trying to turn it into Bogandesia.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

already there. it is difficult to explain just how racist Australia is, and impossible to explain it to Australians, who are convinced against all possible evidence that it is not

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago

i mean, i have a friend who is literally a UFO religion believer, but they're decent and politically good and trustworthy and present as normal-English, so

[-] self@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago

see occasionally you meet a UFO person and they’re normal and you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit. in effect, their UFO hobby is essentially a modified radio/birdwatching hobby that’s hopefully driving them to learn more about the world around them

but much more often you meet a UFO person and hear the absolute worst thing you’ve heard all month while looking for an escape route, without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up because you wouldn’t discuss lizard people with them.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit

you know, I don't know if I've actually run into this kind of conversation. I don't think I have. or if I almost did, I fairly likely applied a conversation logic-shortcircuit way before it got there (because of ambient red flag count). but fuck me, if I don't know exactly the kind of person you're referring to.... :|

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

also

without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up

ZA has many problems (and oh christ could I wax lyrical), but thank fuck I do not live in fucking eaglecountry

it's a whole fucked-up 'ole dynamic when you need to "watch your back" in the most very literal sense because you didn't eat some bozo's shit :|

this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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