Welcome to November, and 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.)
just a quick note that our very favourite mr. musk spent half a bil in us dollars on election shenanigans and all he got is blue texas, and i mean it, texas is now blue across the whole slate, including the governor and the u.s. senator.
the very effective mr. musk!
it was quite funny how, while counts were going up, he just entirely shut the fuck up for about 3~4 hours. not a tweet in sight
must’ve been tragically hard overcome that rage. poor pissbaby, so sad. anyway,
Although my district wasn’t very contested, I am still happy that I voted. For the past two years, the oligarchs have operated under the assumption that they are immune from consequences. The AI bros believed that politics was an irrelevant pastime beneath their notice. If anything, I am happy knowing that they now feel fear.
I have more hope for putting serious pressure on my middle-of-the-road Dem rep. The district here only really turned Dem around 20 years ago thanks to the influx of Bay Area bedroom-community commuters, but there are still plenty of families around who immigrated as ag workers. So he already felt a degree of pressure, but now I feel like urging him to get on board with properly punishing the very worst Trump excesses might (might!) not be an empty gesture anymore.
Does that mean Musk is now legally obligated to transition or was it just the children?
Trans people continue to be very worried about US politics despite the blue wave. In Washington and Colorado the trans sports ban is ahead. In Colorado the trans youth healthcare ban is ahead. A lot of the transphobic democrats are doing OK vote wise.
The very real risk here is that trans rights continue to backslide even under a democratic congress or, two years from now, a democratic congress and executive branch.
So while the transgender for everyone memes are appreciated, we’re not out of the woods yet. Liberals are also susceptible to anti-trans propaganda and boy howdy there has been a lot of it.
All that said: the trans council does not bestow the honor of transition on Musk. He must remain cis and miserable.
While I have absolutely no hope in democrats or liberals for meaningfully supporting trans people, I would love to be proven wrong.
I am at least glad that hunting down trans people and burning down any place where people (especially kids) can get gender affirming care is probably not going to be an active priority up and down the various levels and branches of government the way it seemed to be for a while there. I’m not entirely convinced it’s a step in the right direction yet, but it should at least be a temporary halt in most areas.
This is a pattern, with the exceptions of AFD and Trump, every time he supports a guy they lose. The guy has the moneybags of death.
Anyway well done US voters. Yall won a decisive battle now win the war.
@Soyweiser @mawhrin his principal problem is that he’s an utterly repellent loser and everybody hates him 🤷
Yep, and no amount of building toys can change that. Lets hope blue Texas is going to take taxing him a bit more seriously.
hopefully also a lot of accountability and secrets opened up
congratulations to the us voters for the blue tidal wave!!
Also, with such a big blue wave theres no way in hell JD Vance is becoming president like AI 2027 predicted (that was already suspect before all this)
The rationalist attitude towards politics really is something else. Either politics is a pointless sideshow compared to the machine god, or they are the ultimate politics understanders. I could not come up with a worse way to market AI than they did.
I’m not the most politically astute person, but even I know that AI is a perfect symbol of the hated oligarchy. AI is a tool for the rich to plunder the labor and resources of the poor, all while dehumanizing them in favor of the machine. Of course AI is politically toxic. The rationalists are so far up their own asses that they can’t even think of this basic viewpoint.
I used to dislike when Bernie Sanders would take the warnings of the AI doom prophets too seriously, but now I realize that it is still a shrewd strategy, because the outcome is good in the end (bad for the AI companies). If they start talking about how AI will cause human extinction, it is bad either way if they are sincere or if they are grifting. Jon Ossoff even referenced the human extinction narrative in his victory speech. The political reaction was not “please help the AI companies figure out AI safety,” but “shut that shit down right now.” And that is the right thing to do.
A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are. Others have ideas that are extremely simplistic, like there are lots of lesswrong post proposing one cool trick to get trump on their side or get normies to understand AI doomerism.
Yeah, they have all these big brain plans for research programs into aligning AI, not getting that if they actually get the public or any major political figures to really believe their doomer ideas “shut that shit down” with maybe a side of “throw some people in jail” is the common sense response.
When I first encountered people trying to expand upon the Mark Fisher interpretation of hauntology, a few years ago, I thought they were perhaps overreaching. But after a few more years of observation, now I no longer think so. The rationalist project isn’t really about predicting the future, and perhaps never really has been. Its conservative essence is to enshrine and protect a certain, mainly pop-cultural, framework about what the future should look like, and events are now passing that framework by. It only gets stranger from here.
This is such a great way of looking at it, thanks.
Of course, a lot of the creators of that future were themselves politically right-wing or libertarian. Think Heinlein.
*wishcasted