Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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 soo 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.
hahahaha happy garbage day everybody
wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, itād kind of make sense if the people Iāve known who just causally slipped āby the way fairies are realā into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didnāt pick up on
one day Iāll find a way to shoehorn our experience with a Waldorf School into a sneer.
In summary, fairy-themed fascism can be tied back into the whole Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, esoteric Hitlerism shtick. You most commonly get ambushed with it when dealing with fallen hippies, but it is diffusing into the wider online right via weird 4chan things.
the original recipe nazis were deep into occultism so maybe
see also all the TERFs yesterday loudly coming out in support of Power and her Nazi revelation
the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway, or perhaps just walking over to the other side of the same room
It is funny how mad TERFs get when you mention they are saying the same things as neo-nazis, and then a few days later another TERF who is also a natzi is revealed again.
@self
This is one of those David Icke things where youāre not sure if reptilians/fairies/aliens mean reptilians/fairies/aliens or if theyāre some kind of code or euphemism.
If you always bet on āeverything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black peopleā, you will beat the house. Canadians, lizards, trans people, common punctuation marks, apparently also the seelie court I guess.
having unfortunately known several David Icke fans: itās always veiled antisemitism, and the veil gradually disappears the more you let them talk
e: yes, the area I live in is teeming with various flavors of conspiracy nut, why do you ask
I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like
āah ah but he wrote books - that surely canāt be the works of a person frothing in racism!ā is something Iāve heard from a surprising number of people Iāve met
if racism made people illiterate every facebook group and every youtube comment section would look completely different
the answer is ābothā
I know someone whoās a practicing christian and has said theyāve seen angels
technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have ā¦ not pushed matters
(e: not claiming this person I reference is racist, more that Iāve heard some really fucking kooky shit in many spectra, so I donāt know how much of a heuristic that sort of thing is by itself. the fairies thing may be a bit more concrete/direct - gonna have to try test it on some flaming racists sometime)
I think the connection isnāt with belief in the supernatural, but with the specific belief that there are things around us that look like people but arenāt people. I can easily see how the latter at minimum makes one very susceptible for racism.
If people start believing that androids are a real thing (not the OS, human like robots), itās only a matter of time before people will be accused of being androids.
@mountainriver @froztbyte The NPC meme says hi.
@hirvox @mountainriver @froztbyte Like a lot of other things that were funny in the late 80s and early 90s, the NPC meme has lost its shine ā¦
agreed, far too much chan shittery attached to it
I thought that was Hirvox point, that the NPC meme now goes hand in hand with Chan shittery because the NPC meme allows for an easy format to say that other people are not real people. With the added bonus of a built-in ājust jokingā defence.
I see echoes of it when idiots discuss ChatGPT being AGI - āitās at the level of the average (dumb) human, so itās AGIā. Implicit is that the average human isnāt just not intelligent, but unaware of reality in a way that makes them like NPCs in computer games.
ā-
Edit hereās an example, no source because I donāt want to start a dogpile.
If you concede that cats are made of marmalade and always win Texas Hold 'Em games, then I donāt think the argument against squaring the circle holds up.
@mountainriver @froztbyte Yes, and if confronted the memelord can retreat into the more palatable-in-polite-company form of āthey just repeat what theyāre told _as if_ they were reprogrammable and without any individual thoughtā. And _clearly_ the confronter is one of them, because they didnāt recognize this important nuance, thus proving the point.
such people are not much different from movie sharks: you boop āem on the nose to make them go away
@cstross @mountainriver @froztbyte Whatās old is new again. I hear even phrenology is making a comeback.
wait, what? What sort of context? Multiple people? FFS TELL
so I think I must just have one of those faces cause itās been something that multiple former friends have revealed to me, and itās usually a weird show of trust? and itās always something like āyou know, I just think fairies must be real, like theyāve got to be out there? you know?ā
and in all cases Iāve gone āā¦oh thatās coolā and mentally earmarked that person as ādo not trust with heavy machineryā
just remembered someone i met decades ago going on and on about spiritualism and ESP and just happened to drop in their own massive racism, thereās definitely a type
The crystals to anti-vaxx to full-blown fascism pipeline is real and I have more than a few cousins deep in that KKK hole. Hate to be a science brodude, but all the spiritualism stuff can be a gullibility magnet for those prone to self radicalisation (the bad type)
yeah i have one of those faces too (tall, blue eyes, Danish cheekbones), disconcerting number of nazis who wanted me to be in with them
I get the club invite most times I speak afrikaans in pretoria
in australia the club invite is just a way of saying āhiā to your fellow white person
Iāve never had the full on āletās be nazis togetherā invite but Iāve had several people launch unprompted into ānow that itās just us white folks we can talk for realā mode. internally they must have been like āI see white skin, we are clear for takeoff, 54321ā
funnily enough it hasnāt happened since I became visibly trans
ja that can happen/s here too
presumably your bones comprehend all the non-weather reasons that .au is such a popular za expat destination
those particular south africans apparently made perth in particular a fucking delight of genteel racism in the late 90s
tho they didnāt particularly change the nature of it
@dgerard
Trying to turn it into Bogandesia.
i mean, i have a friend who is literally a UFO religion believer, but theyāre decent and politically good and trustworthy and present as normal-English, so
see occasionally you meet a UFO person and theyāre normal and you only find out about their interest in UFOs because itās the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit. in effect, their UFO hobby is essentially a modified radio/birdwatching hobby thatās hopefully driving them to learn more about the world around them
but much more often you meet a UFO person and hear the absolute worst thing youāve heard all month while looking for an escape route, without making it too obvious because youāre fairly certain theyāre armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up because you wouldnāt discuss lizard people with them.
you know, I donāt know if Iāve actually run into this kind of conversation. I donāt think I have. or if I almost did, I fairly likely applied a conversation logic-shortcircuit way before it got there (because of ambient red flag count). but fuck me, if I donāt know exactly the kind of person youāre referring toā¦ :|
also
ZA has many problems (and oh christ could I wax lyrical), but thank fuck I do not live in fucking eaglecountry
itās a whole fucked-up 'ole dynamic when you need to āwatch your backā in the most very literal sense because you didnāt eat some bozoās shit :|
:<
@self
Have to wonder what happened to her brain since the days when she had stuff published at the Guardian.
given some of the other things Iāve seen from the guardian, not sure that wouldāve necessarily been a contraindicator
@froztbyte
I mean they didnāt seem very fashy at first. The later ones (2018, when she was fashy on the down-low ) started to get TERFy but earlier (2010-2014) it was all "the police arenāt your friendā and stuff about government trying to restrict the right to protest, etc.
(I looked over her Guardian contributions after reading about the bankruptcy etc in this thread.)
I guess that is the same duration/timeline as the guardian downslope arc
@froztbyte
The guardian is kind of irrelevant to what I was getting at.
she had a piece in The Quietus in 2018, but by 2020 they had kicked a writer out for being pals with DC Miller, her co-plaintiff in this case
(just for confusion one of the Quietus guys is a different Luke Turner)