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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
OT: Todays homily had some anti-AI points and I felt very cheered by it. Its one thing to hear you guys, but in person is a treat.
Science writer Philip Ball observes,
Just watched Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) say “We believe as an industry… that within 3-5 years we’ll have AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as [big deal voice] the smartest mathematician, physicist, [lesser deal voice] artist, writer, thinker, politician … I call this the San Francisco consensus, because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco… Within the next year or two, this foundation gets locked in, and we’re not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that…There will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans”
“Everyone who believes this is in San Francisco” approaches “the female orgasm is a myth” levels of self-own.
Re: beef tallow fries. I tried some tonight. I liked them. They taste exactly as you’d expect: beefy. Is it worth fascism? Definitely not.
I’m not sure I want to know, but what is the relation from beef tallow to fascism, is it related to the whole seed oil conspiracy? Or is it one of these imagined ultra manly masculine man things for maxxing the intake of meat? (I’m losing track of all the insane bullshit, there’s just too much.)
A little more depth. Feel free to read up on the wellness to fascism pipeline in your own time, but here’s an outline of how I understand it:
The concept of wellness begins when the general public is encouraged to care about health. Wellness influencers are soon to follow (consider: Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda. The aerobic gymnastics world championships).
The wellness influencer population balloons during the current age of social media. A lot of them begin parroting conspiracy theories, for good reason! There are real conspiracies with negative health impacts. Consider: Big Ag pushing HFCS. Unfortunately, not all of these influencers are gonna be well read on the science, and someone looking to become fit and healthy is probably more likely to just uncritically listen to models on instagram. So now there is a huge community of people that will uncritically believe conspiracy theories as long as they come from a wellness influencer.
Now, whether by design or accident, far-right conspiracies are sprinkled into this mix. While there is probably already an undercurrent of this*, the situation takes a nosedive during the early stages of the COVID pandemic. There’s a huge explosion of fascist conspiracies, notably the idea that the pandemic was caused by foreigners, causing anti-asian hate crimes to spike. So, where are health-related conspiracies going to propagate most virulently? The wellness community!
So, how do seed oils factor into this? Let’s say you’re someone thinking about becoming healthier. You don’t really know much about health science, and aren’t really trying to fix that situation. One day, you’re on tiktok, getting bombarded by thirst traps, when one day, the algorithm throws a fit thirst trap your way to tell you about one simple trick that will help your heart health: switching from seed oils to beef tallow and butter. Now, you’re not totally stupid, and you know that for some reason, beef tallow and butter are supposed to be kinda bad for you, so you’re a little skeptical. That’s when the influencer tells you that canola oil, one of the most popular and cheapest seed oils, doesn’t come from a real plant- Canola is a portmanteau of “Can” from Canada, where canola oil was developed, and “ola” from “oleum”, latin for oil. That’s right, you heard them: Canola oil was invented in a lab by Big (canadian) Science! A couple more tiktoks and spoonfuls of the naturalistic fallacy later and QAnon themselves is knocking at your door, looking for a place to stay.
*Of course, there is a fascism to wellness pipeline in play as well, though this is a little more straightforward. You can’t look like the master race if you’re unfit. You can’t be pure if you eat processed foods. But also buy these Alex Jones approved nutrient supplements, etc.
You’ve actually pretty much got it. There’s the wellness to fascism pipeline, which includes seed-oil-phobia and beef-tallow-philia. The biggest proponent right now is likely the current US secretary of health and human services RFK jr., who in a recent interview at a steak and shake decried seed oils in favour of beef tallow.
I don’t actually think there’s much of a hyper-masculine angle to it, but wouldn’t be surprised if I’m wrong. I think the manosphere would be more into eating meat that needs to be hunted. I don’t look much at that part of the internet.
More discussion at a.s here
I feel like I’ve seen chud weirdos ranting about seed oils suppressing testosterone levels, but I could be hallucinating
Y’know, beef tallow fries could’ve probably done well at steakhouses without the stench of Eau de Fascism turning people off of it.
You’re already going there to have some meat, might as well infuse the fries with some extra beefy flavour.
Depends on the steakhouse. Take a shitty american chain steakhouse, for example; it could go either way. They might still try cater to vegetarians, because these chains are a volume business. But it also makes sense in that saturating your meal with beef makes sense for a shitty chain steakhouse.
For a fancier place concerned with taste, having beef on everything would desensitise you to that taste, and would probably kill the experience.
People might not be aware but places like FT seem to really dislike the techbro people
FT Alphaville is the bloggy section of FT, it’s where the writers let rip
Know it was a blog, so I meant my post as a bit of a joke, as this isn’t any proof of a general FT hate. (but like all jokes, it isn’t just a full joke, as I have noticed that a lot of financial media like FT (there is also a dutch tv show for example) randomly can be a lot more pro ‘leftwing’ financial stances (I mean the more left-liberal/socdem ones, not full blown fully automated gay luxury space communism) than you would expect (This is also a bit of a blindspot for a lot of more online leftwingers).
FT are centrist market liberals, but gibbering US nazis will be happy to tell you why that’s communism.
This is the kind of quality journalism that I need more of in my life. Also I learned a surprising amount about olive oil, which means it’s more useful than anything else Sam Altman has been involved in as far as I can tell.
New 404 Media article: Elon Musk’s Grok AI Will ‘Remove Her Clothes’ In Public, On X
So we can add “fully automatic sexual harassment” to the list of reasons Twitter can die in a fire