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)
Books would be really boring if the protagonists were all just the author speaking as themself but using various funny voices.
there’s not a lot of ambiguity in what the novels are getting at, so no offense but this line of argument is not worth engaging directly. but I will point out that I didn’t say what pratchett’s views were. part of why people don’t look askance at these books is that his other work is at odds with the realpolitik message I’m pointing out. I can’t and I don’t draw conclusions about his ‘real’ views based on the vimes novels
The novels may be trying to say something, but how it plays out still needs to make sense in the world of the novel and be coherent with the characters as depicted.
Vimes is basically a stereotypical jaded and cynical old-timer who has ideas about how things could be better, but has seen enough to know that the powerful would never allow it.
Incremental improvements are made but larger changes are difficult except sometimes in places that are even worse than Ankh-Morpork.
It’s kind of like all the people who are aware of what’s likely needed to prevent climate change disaster, but are also aware that they don’t have the power to make it happen and that the forces of inertia and corruption are powerful enough to block or roll back anything remotely significant.
