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)

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    14 hours ago

    My computer crashed as I was writing a response. In short:

    I think fedi existing and having the userbase it has is “victory” enough. Capitalism and fascism push us to think “winning” and “success” are the greatest thing to aspire to. To “win” over capitalism and fascism will require an unlearning and disavowal of those aspirations.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      This is absolutely an important idea, but in the context of anti-capitalism I think there’s a kind of catch-22 at play. The alternative systems that operate under a capitalist paradigm have serious externalities that come back to bite us whether we engage or not with them. My wife and I have spent some late nights over the last week trying to help family and friends in North Carolina keep track of which roads are usable, who is or isn’t confirmed to be alive yet, etc. Maybe I’m a little extra feisty about climate change today, but it seems like while the alternative doesn’t have to “win” in the same way that capitalists want to we do still need them to lose. Existing independently in parallel isn’t a sustainable end goal, though I do agree that parallel structures are an important part of the solution.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      12 hours ago

      oh yeah, I agree quite strongly with that sentiment too (and that’s why I didn’t re-use the words of the post I linked)

      the fedi has some pretty dire threats (shit like threads etc) that I do think it needs to deal with by way of more teeth (consider it self-protective boundary setting), but in general I think a lot of the current state of it satisfying people just for being happy to be themselves is perfectly fine and good

      side note: part of my problem is that my thinking on matters is a bit waterlogged due to shortage of knowledge/references, and backfilling that is … well, hard to find the right resources for reading, and perpetual spoon shortage. I’ve been working my way through some Graeber and some other stuff, but very slowly and need more things. also doesn’t help that ZA is, functionally, a desert island