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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      Is Google lacing their free coffee??? How could a woman with at least one college degree believe that the government is even mechanically capable of dissolving into a throne for Eric Schmidt.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      23 hours ago

      fuck me that is some awful fucking moderation. I can’t imagine being so fucking bad at this that I:

      • dole out a ban for being rude to a fascist
      • dole out a second ban because somebody in the community did some basic fucking due diligence and found out one of the accounts defending the above fascist has been just a gigantic racist piece of shit elsewhere, surprise
      • in the process of the above, I create a safe space for a fascist and her friends

      but for so many of these people, somehow that’s what moderation is? fucking wild, how the fuck did we get here

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        11 hours ago

        See, you’re assuming the goal of moderation is to maintain a healthy social space online. By definition this excludes fascists. It’s that old story about how to make sure your punk bar doesn’t turn into a nazi punk bar. But what if instead my goal is to keep the peace in my nazi punk bar so that the normies and casuals keep filtering in and out and making me enough money that I can stay in business? Then this strategy makes more sense.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Post by Corbet the editor. “We get it: people wish that we had not highlighted work by this particular author. Had we known more about the person in question, we might have shied away from the topic. But the article is out now, it describes a bit of interesting technology, people have had their say, please let’s leave it at that.”

      So you updated the article to reflect this right? padme.jpg

      • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        6 hours ago

        Seems like they’ve actually done this now. There’s a preface note now.

        This topic was chosen based on the technical merit of the project before we were aware of its author’s political views and controversies. Our coverage of technical projects is never an endorsement of the developers’ political views. The moderation of comments here is not meant to defend, or defame, anybody, but is in keeping with our longstanding policy against personal attacks. We could certainly have handled both topic selection and moderation better, and will endeavor to do so going forward.

        Which is better than nothing, I guess, but still feels like a cheap cop-out.

        Side-note: I can actually believe that they didn’t know about Justine being a fucking nazi when publishing this, because I remember stumbling across some of her projects and actually being impressed by it, and then I found out what an absolute rabbit hole of weird shit this person is. So I kinda get seeing the portable executables project, thinking, wow, this is actually neat, and running with it.

        Not that this is an excuse, because when you write articles for a website that should come with a bit of research about the people and topic you choose to cover and you have a bit more responsibility than someone who’s just browsing around, but what do I know.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          4 hours ago

          Well, at least they put down something. More than I expected.

          And doing research on people? In this economy?