Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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.)

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      It’s true that these analogies can be stigmatizing, but they needn’t be. As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life.

      This bothers me more than I can explain.

      ICE as autoimmune disorder presupposes that it’s normally a good thing to have ICE around and it’s just malfunctioning as an exceptional state of things. If ICE is an immune system (malfunctional or not), what are we immigrants?

    • Anisette [any/all]@quokk.auEnglish
      4·
      4 hours ago

      He knows how LLMs work, right? This really is just cope because he got called out for being weird about using them. Really fucking disappointing

    • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      Kind of wild that the guy who popularized “enshittification” as a term will die on the hill that the technology which drives the industrial enshittification of all human media is fine actually, because some people find the plugins useful.

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Take “Morgellons Disease,” a psychosomatic belief that you have wires growing in your body, which causes sufferers to pick at their skin to the point of creating suppurating wounds. Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion:

      Nitpick but this is unusually sloppy for Doctorow. 1) People with Morgellon’s don’t believe they have wires growing out of sores, but fibres (which upon examination turn out to be cotton for clothes). 2) The original Morgellons is a putative children’s disease «wherein they critically break out with harsh Hairs on their Backs, which takes off the Unquiet Symptomes of the Disease, and delivers them from Coughs and Convulsions.» Which is quite different from the modern condition, whose sufferers have skin sores anywhere in the body with fibrous material looking like lint, dandelion fluff etc., and not particularly associated with convulsions. And 3) The association between the two was made by Miriam Leitao, a mother who believes her son suffers from the disease, and has gone to countless doctors and media trying to prove it’s real. So it’s an attempt to legitimise the postulated disease by cherry-picking something “historical” that vaguely resembles it.