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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Carl Bergstrom notes a publicity stunt by Anthropic:
Hang around for the ātrust me bro, I saw it on YouTubeā guy in the comments.
when Bergstrom came to campus last year, he mentioned that he wargamed a pandemic response with vaccinations for the Bush administration, and they were worried enough about people raiding vaccine trucks, mad max style, that they planned for all these armed escorts.
ā¦ instead we get to live in eddington.
Iāve been rewatching ReGenesis and you can sorta see a similar background to it (it being of the same vintage): bio attacks are the Big Bad, thereās actual mobilisation against viral spread, etc
kinda whiplash just how fucking rapidly the antivaxxer movement (and general anti-science) managed to spread and become popular in the years hence (and specifically circa the ~2016 mark)
As a counterpoint, thereās a local outbreak of meningitis in Kent (UK) and panicked kids are lining up for vaccinations there.
COVID mostly hit the invisible elderly. Itās hard to imagine what would have happened if kids 0-6 were the most vulnerable.
oh sure, I didnāt mean to imply that good isnāt happening, more observing on how far and popular the whackjobs have managed to come
People are trying to get vaccinations for that here in .nl (as in one other country it already spread to a university iirc, so not totally unwise)
Over here, measles hits mostly kids, but if anything, the new measles epidemic seems to have made antivaxxers double down.
Yeah itās tragic, but I think it can be āexplainedā in that incorrect idea that measles isnāt that bad, really, and it was ānaturalā to get it. I donāt know the exact lethality differences between the diseases in question - just that for an otherwise healthy 20 year old university student, being forced to stay at home because of a disease mostly killing octogenarians is easier to protest against than something thatās killing you and your fellow ravers.