Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th December 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th December 2024
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
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So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some.... boutique... views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:
- Lab-grown meat
- Modern architecture is rotten
- Population decline is an existential threat
- Elon Musk and Peter Thiel
How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?
the absolute state of american politics: rentseeker ceo gets popped by a libertarian
Someone else said it, but for someone completely accustomed to a life of easy privilege, having it suddenly disappear can be utterly intolerable.
We should expect more of this to come. The ascendant right wing is pushing policies that only deliver for people who are already stinking rich. Even if 99% of those who vote that way go along with the propaganda line in the face of their own disappointment, that's still a lot of unhappy people, who are not known for intellectual consistency or calm self-reflection, in a country overflowing with guns. All it takes is one ammosexual who decides that his local Congressman has been co-opted by the (((globalists))), you know?
there's gotta be many more than 1% of right to far-right wingers clocking that that ambient suckiness is result of republican policies or profit squeezing, it's just that i expected them to be way more apathetic
qanon and weird nazis were around for some time and they definitely can get worse, but i don't think it's it
also, killing CEOs is more of traditional activity of more ideologically consistent far left groups, like RAF. can't have shit in late capitalism
RAF's aims were explicitely accelerationist - their terror would provoke a ferocious repressional response that would open the eyes of the masses to the repressive government and trigger a revolution.
StRev was calling him TPOT adjacent and woodgrains was having a bit of a panic over it.
"Our righteous warriors are only supposed to kill brown people and women, not captains of industry!!"
dust specks vs CEOs
Thats a very real viewpoint being pushed by the Thiel adjacent far righters.
tfw the Holy Book (Atlas Shrugged) was misinterpreted.
According to his goodreads he had not read it yet.
It's so embarrassing to watch upper-middle class (at best!) rationalists get their panties in a twist over Luigi. At least the right wing talking heads are getting paid, these guys are just mad he did things instead of tweeting about things.
"My heavens, our self-regarding supremacist ideology can't possibly imply violence... can it???"
Do you have a link? I'm interested. (Also, I see you posted something similar a couple hours before I did. Sorry I missed that!)
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1866197443404247185?s=46&t=nT1XIOTx9ax3_3I0GXvgVQ
https://x.com/st_rev/status/1866191524498719147?s=46&t=nT1XIOTx9ax3_3I0GXvgVQ
Sorry for not using nitter but im on phone.
From the replies:
I see the interest in AI, Peter Thiel, and the far future, but it's a lot more rationality adjacent than EA.
"It's a lot more country than western"
meanwhile his twitter:
The starving people are tied to the track, the trolley barreling down at them, they are screaming at the rich to release them or pull the lever, which they can't, not without the rich guys help. But the rich are not helping. Why are the rich not helping Elon?
TWG: is a good reminder that atrocities don’t come from convenient avatars of all I oppose
Random bluecheck: On the contrary, this just reaffirms my biases that e/accs and AGI race-promoters are the source of every bad thing in the world.
TWG: was he e/acc?
We are in the 'he only followed some e/acc, he never said he was e/acc' phase. Wonder what his manifesto will say.
this whole exchange is so beautiful i love these stupid fucking idiots WHY ARE THEY EVERYWHERE
That conversation reads like from a variation of Mafia/Werewolf where you have to figure out who in your circle of rationalists is secretly e/acc and wants to build the torment nexus.
The man who hypes up that higher intelligences can figure out laws and rules from data quicker and more thoroughly than lower intelligences defending e/acc accounts by going 'well they never openly advocated for killing, so this is not a valid concern'. Did he forget he advocated for bombing datacenters? Guess he never read any science fiction where '"rational" leader accidentally inspires murderous cult', By The God Emperor, somebody should write a science fiction novel about that. (E: hell, does he even get what accellerationism implies? Somebody reading between the lines and going 🎵 'So let the games begin, A heinous crime, a show of force, A murder would be nice of course'🎵 is not out of the question).
bwahahaha "most reasonable operationalizations; conditional upon being e/acc." Why does this person make me think of nasal, vaguely whiny prequel Spock?
"Tensor Templar" lmao. Hey buddy, what did the Knights Templar do, besides banking?
Hopefully it elaborates on whatever the fuck this is:
Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal.
The solution to falling birthdates isn’t immigration. It’s cultural.
Encourage natural human interaction, sex, physical fitness and spirituality:
- ban Tenga fleshlights and “Japan Real Hole” custom pornstar pocket pussies being sold in Don Quixote grocery stores
- replace conveyor belt sushi and restaurant vending machine ordering, with actual human interaction with a waiter
- replace 24/7 eSports cafes where young males earn false fitness signals via Tekken fighting and Overwatch shooting games, with athletics in school
- heavily stigmatize maid cafes where lonely salarymen pay young girls to dress as anime characters and perform anime dances for them
- revitalize traditional Japanese culture (Shintoism, Okinawan karate, onsen, etc)
If we couldn't react with "wake up babe, new copypasta just dropped" or "tag yourself, I'm the false fitness signal in the maid café", we couldn't react to a lot of life.
being performatively worried about Japanese birth rates is a HN trope, for whatever that's worth
being performatively worried about maid cafes specifically is absolutely a new one on me
Pretty sure this person has been watching a lot of very inappropriate anime
i thought for some time now that problems with japanese society are things like stifling conformism, ridiculous degree of nationalism and sexism, how they are functionally an one-party state or stiff strictly hierarchial relationships that appear out of nowhere the entire time. but yeah definitely this seed oils level of conspiracy thinking is accepted truth on eacc twitter
it also sounds extremely specific
I dont know enough about Japan, but is it just me or is that a very specific fleshlight gripe? E: yes, I guess, this means I'm tagging myself as the fleshlight or something.
Menawhile: tenga stock prices soar because apparently their toys are so good that a guy was willing to kill for them to be banned
This reminded me that TWG has a Twitter account. I could have done without that reminder.
A few years ago, I would have pointed to Elon Musk as someone approximately where I was in the political spectrum. The left pushed him away, the right welcomed him, and he spent hundreds of millions of dollars and put in immense effort to elect Trump.
No, you embossed carbuncle. Apartheid boy was evil all along; you were just too media-illiterate to see through the propaganda.
The left did not push Elon Musk away. The left has fundamentally different interests and values to the billionaire and alleged rapist.
lol that's exquisite
but you could tell the guy was into Effective Altruism from how he did dust specks vs CEOs
this guy nailing the UHC CEO is the only good thing they will ever have a chance of claiming credit for, so of course they rush to disavow him
@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984 lab-gown mest is fine tho. I'd be all over it if it ever works.
But yeah he'd fit right in on LW I'm sureEdited based on later chat: eh
https://med-mastodon.com/@noodlemaz/113641637798676074one of the best articles I've ever read was an inch by inch teardown of the entire concept of mass produced lab grown meat: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ . it's never, ever going to work at scale and I'd go so far as to say it's the food equivalent of all the usual tech grifts we talk about here
if luigi incident kicks off next miracle tech sv bubble after ai this would be the single dumbest outcome out of this entire situation
so far tpot got exposure and fake manifesto included altmed dogwhistle right in the title
@sc_griffith thanks, that is a cool piece! Indeed having done plenty cell culture myself and seeing those shockingly astronomical meat consumption figures, the solutions seem much clearer to me. I doubt LGM will be a useful reality in my lifetime, maybe far in the future. So, people need to stop eating meat, and eat plants instead.
Many are already doing so! I've mostly stopped with meat myself, just some fish to go.
But we need political will. Change of culture. Sanctions on the US, etc :/
@sc_griffith stood out:
"a mature, scaled-up industry could eventually achieve a ratio of only 3-4 calories in for every calorie out, compared to the chicken’s 10 and the steer’s 25. That would still make cultured meat much more inefficient compared to just eating plants themselves... And the cells themselves might still be fed on a diet of commodity grains, the cheapest and most environmentally destructive inputs available. But it would represent a major improvement."@sc_griffith last one (probably) - as I'm now working quite a lot adjacent to philanthropists (and find the whole concept and reality of that deeply morally unpleasant on many levels), v interesting interweaving of that aspect.
And again, comes back to the EA nonsense.
Sigh
Same. I'm not being critical of lab-grown meat. I think it's a great idea.
But the pattern of things he's got an opinion on suggests a familiarity with rationalist/EA/accelerationist/TPOT ideas.