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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Sorry this wasn’t up earlier, I couldn’t connect to awful.)
That was the party line in the American foreign-policy crowd since winter 2021/2022. They thought that if the ‘great power’ Russia invaded, Ukraine would fall. So Burja’s tweet was not even original, just the same thing any 23-year-old staffer in a new suit was writing.
Yeah, the party-line was far from realistic and reflected the West’s own imperial hubris, but there’s a spectrum there. When the fullscale invasion finally happened, the Jake Sullivans weren’t going around for weeks about how Ukraine is doomed. And again, there was at least some room in the mainstream for eastern europeans or even just people who had traveled in Ukraine and understood the country & the people. In that regard Samo shares much more with the vatniks (sorry, the “realists”) like John Mearsheimer and The Economist, who kept (and still keep) telling people Russia would win any day now.