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)
Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldn’t be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.
Like, there’s plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and it’s not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And “generational insolvency” is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.
But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Saying they’re dumb and incurious offers almost too much respect. They believe in racial eugenics based on IQ - look at the kind of shit Elon Musk retweets. Scaremongering about fertility is just the way they get to the racial eugenics, while pretending it’s a necessity not a choice.
Edit: and now I see froztbyte said almost the same thing first. Oops
same way as other nazis - boop 'em on the nose
I’d be willing to wager a guess that this fragile little flower has never had a “physical altercation” in their life and would walk away with fucking ~ptsd from a single “hey that shit is not okay” boop
if you’re talking about eigenrowboat, I don’t think I agree. they’re quite curious, but they “just” go in with a particular viewpoint and a desire to “prove their point” in the most prevaricating way possible. it’s no accident that the entire sphere of “how do we make scientific racism and nazism more socially palatable” gravitates around these fuckers. if you’re instead talking about them making these comments in a “see the poor are dumb and useless and thus deserve what they get”, well, see aforementioned shitty opinions
Nah, it’s the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think they’re smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that they’re the biggest bestest boys.
These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because that’s not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time they’ll have more power and it’ll work, even though it’s the basic underlying shape of Creation that they’re ultimately at war with.