Want to wade into the snowy 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 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.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I first sighted Nick Bostrom in a series of mad-science-flavoured erotic horror comics on the Internet Archive (The Apsinthion Protocol and Progress in Research by the same writer). I wish more people had the sense to keep those ideas in the world of weird fiction like Charlie Stross does
The comic I linked is pretty tame (particularly the first few pages with the Bostrom reference). The whole series contains a wide variety of squicks so use your judgement before exploring.
@CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.
There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card’s Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)
People more plugged in than me in US culture war issues: is the opposition to infant male circumcision driven primarily by anti-semitism / anti-islamism or by more general manosphere vibes?
my experience has been that it’s actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.
all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue
I think the incels are into intactivism because a circumcision is an unrectifiable loss. Incels are deeply attracted to events and actions that are unrectifiable. Think about all the robots on 4chan bemoaning the absence of mutual adolescent love. One can be a turbo virgin all the way into college at least and still turn out fine. Incels didn’t (turn out will), and they didn’t (get any tail in highschool); so that must mean that being a virgin in highschool is what broke them.
In a similar way, many intactivists (especially the r/circumcisiongrief types) blame their sexual inadequacy on their post-natal circumcision, rather than their own psycho sexual issues or their habits of completely monkey-wrenching their shit on the daily. To be absolutely fair, a circ will almost definitely negatively affect your sex life, and really, it’s frustrating to have a completely pointless operation done to your meat without your consent, but I think intactivism is a heatsink its proponents fervor, rather than the source of the anger.
