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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(2026 is off to a great start, isnāt it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
part of what helps is coming here and seeing the spectrum of chud output to inoculate yourself a little.
What REALLY helps is broadening your own knowledge and worldview, in the sense that when you realise that everything is political, you start asking yourself the meta questions. Like, whatās the agenda here, whatās not being said, etc. I mean, understanding author intention is already part of reading comprehension, itās going a little further beyond the face-value meaning. As the memes say, you are not immune to propaganda.
I would add to this that, just to keep things interesting, I also hear the āeverything is politicalā and ādo your own researchā lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists. It can be a way to lock yourself into your current positions and dismiss people who disagree, even when those positions are objectively insane.
Having a broad base of knowledge and understanding a range of different perspectives is important, but the best way to do that includes keeping an open mind and engaging with things that are absolutely not, in the final accounting, worth the time and energy to do so (referring once again to the cranks and conspiracists). The best way I can think to deal with this is to seek out media and discussion spaces that donāt have either a general public or someone like you specifically as the intended audience. And a lot of what gets sneered here does seem to fit into that category, since itās a lot of technocapital cultists writing things for each other rather than giving interviews to the NYT. Like, there is no amount of empathy that will make Curtis Yarvin seem decent when heās writing for other fascists, but you wonāt necessarily see that unless youāre looking a bit deeper than the public profiles.
My following response is a little rambly and unfocused, sorry!
Yes, I acknowledge that you will hear this from them. What they mean can differ and usually is pretty extreme, e.g. ādemocrats are making the frogs gay with fluorideā, ālizard people illuminatiā, or even āthereās a war on Christmasā type shit. And when they say ādo your own researchā, they donāt mean āseek out a variety of sources and verifiable dataā, they mean āread the stuff that agrees with what Iām sayingā.
When I say that everything is political, I mean that at minimum, language is political, and because you need language to talk about anything, everything becomes political. How things are named skews perception; the most relevant example to us is AI. We know that there is no āintelligenceā in an LLM, but does the public? etc. Iāll admit that many might find this trivial, but I would counter that most of these strawmen are the same ones who are scared of pronouns and say they donāt know what they are allowed to say in the workplace anymore.
And generally agree with your second paragraph :) I donāt think anyone here needs this reminder, but Iāll note that an open mind means that you donāt just reject everything new that comes to you; you at least look at it for a bit, see if it passes whatever metaphorical sniff tests you have, and then choose to toss it or engage further. Iām not saying everyone has a nefarious agenda they are trying to push; there are definitely spaces where people are attempting purely informational reporting.
And to bring it back to the original question. If you read something and itās not exactly within your purview, and youāre not sure if itās being said in good faith, you should try to see what else the person has said, especially about things you know about.
E: redaction of fluff
insert previous rant about how fucking awful the term Gell-Mann amnesia is and how we should all stop using it, illustrated with that Batman āthis is the weapon of the enemyā meme
aw, well, iām not precious about the term. All I meant was that if you look at someoneās post history and theyāre a chud, that should inform how you read whatever they write.
Yeah, sorry, this is just a pet peeve of mine. People, including many who should know better, have adopted a term specifically designed to shut down media literacy and foment a ādo your own researchā culture, and it maddens me.
All good friendo