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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentineās Day!)
A little exchange on the EA forums I thought was notable: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EDBQPT65XJsgszwmL/long-term-risks-from-ideological-fanaticism?commentId=b5pZi5JjoMixQtRgh
tldr; a super long essay lumping together Nazism, Communism and religious fundamentalism (I didnāt read it, just the comments). The comment I linked notes how liberal democracies have also killed a huge number of people (in the commenterās home country, in the name of purging communism):
The OPās response is to try to explain how that wasnāt real āliberal democracyā and to try to reframe the discussion. Another commenter is even more direct, they complain half the sources listed are Marxist.
I think itās a bit bold of this commenter to ignore the empirical facts cited in how many people āliberal democraciesā had killed and to exclude sources simply for challenging your ideology.
Just another reminder of how the EA movement is full of right wing thinking and how most of it hasnāt considered even the most basic of leftist thought.
@scruiser @BlueMonday1984 funny how they mock left wingers for Ā«that wasnāt real communismĀ» and then come up with the same excuses for liberal democracies and capitalism whenever one points out all the shit that came out of that. Itās really ALWAYS projection with them, isnāt it?
This reminds me of a discussion I had recently on a fanfic discord (the discussion was sparked by the March for Billionairesā¦). Someone claimed no country had ever pulled itself out of poverty except by capitalism, so I bring up China and the USSR, but apparently those donāt count for the person I was arguing with. They claimed the stats were Goodharted and also that what I was saying was tankie bullshit. I gave up at that point (I probably shouldnāt have bothered in the first place). Like how exactly did they fake or Goodhart going from literal feudalism to industrial superpowers? Also, I find it notable how EAs and āThe Better Angels of Our Natureā type neoliberals are perfectly happy to use overall stats as metrics when it makes a point they are in favor of. āYour GDP went up 3.2%, please ignore the mass environmental devastation from colonialism and neocolonialism that makes your traditional way of life unlivable and thank us Westerners.ā
The funny thing is orthodox marxists wouldnāt necessarily disagree: capitalism is a necessary historical step towards communism. Not sure how that justifies the continued existence of exploitation and billionaires!
@scruiser thereās no winning with these guys. I had a similar experience with someone bringing up South Korea as an example of country that brought itself up by its bootstraps via unfettered capitalism because āplanned economy doesnāt workā, so I had to remind them that SK was a military dictatorship who implemented 5-year plans leveraging billions of foreign investment that was given to it by US to prop it up against NK.
itās crazy how people memoryholed that (and japan doing the same, and a handful of other countries). or how until 2022 war norway wasnāt really thought of as petrostate by people who didnāt pay attention. or how ten years ago, if you said that putin bombed apartments to wage war on chechenya to win elections all to pardon yeltsin, people would think that youāre a crackpot
Nonono if itās US backed then itās capitalist and free market and good donāt you see /s
Not engaging in debate club remans winning
Yep, I should have realized that sooner, at least I gave up on that ādiscussionā before going further.
I continue to maintain that EA boils down to high-dollar consumerism focused on intangible goods. Iām sure that statement wonāt fly on LW or any other EA forum, but my thoughts on psychiatry donāt fly at a Scientologist convention either.