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.)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    23 hours ago

    Inside baseball, and I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but LW is crowing over a legal loss for RationalWiki

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KW5tjMmTqsoRa6zrd/pablo-s-shortform?commentId=wB9jcCPrXzNCLCQXL

    They link to a TracingWoodgrain(!) tweet which is basically just a screenshot of a talk page

    https://xcancel.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1913717061626347642

    I don’t know the significance of this, if any. I don’t recognize the names of any of the plaintiffs(?) in the screenshot, so I find it a bit amusing that probably the only google juice they had were RW.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      121·
      20 hours ago

      An lesswrong:

      countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.

      uh-huh

      An different lesswrong:

      LLMs can provide reasonable fact-checks.

      Christ on a futa dick

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        8 hours ago

        when people do stuff like dismissing x-risk because their top Google search result pointed them at RationalWiki, what exactly was the proper non-free-speech-limiting solution to this problem?

        How can we leverage the monopoly of violence of the state to promote our religious views?

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      20 hours ago

      The closest I could find to an official statement is at the bottom here:

      We are under advisement from counsel not to discuss any ongoing litigation in public at this time. We’ll let you know the status of the current issues when we are able to. Your patience and understanding are most appreciated.

      Further up the page, an IP editor says that another user is probably TW; the user in question has since been blocked for “ban evasion”. Dunno what that’s about.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      21 hours ago

      Ah that is a bit sad, I often link to Rationalwiki as it properly documents several far right people. (no idea about the people listed here, never heard of them). And seeing people defend/use the twg article is a bit sad. But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already. Anyway, typical Rationalism rationalization bullshit.

      E: seems the problem is that RW is in a SLAPP suits allowed state and has little money. Of course the anti-RW people will use this loss to claim that RW is actually defamatory.