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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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      1 month ago

      This almost reads like an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of worrying about animal welfare, like you are supposed to be a ridiculous hypocrite if you think factory farming is fucked yet are indifferent to the cumulative suffering caused to termites every time an exterminator sprays your house so it doesnā€™t crumble.

      Relying on the mean estimate, giving a dollar to the shrimp welfare project prevents, on average, as much pain as preventing 285 humans from painfully dying by freezing to death and suffocating. This would make three human deaths painless per penny, when otherwise the people would have slowly frozen and suffocated to death.

      Dog, youā€™ve lost the plot.

      FWIW a charity providing the means to stun shrimp before death by freezing as is the case here isnā€™t indefensible, but the way itā€™s framed as some sort of an ethical slam dunk even compared to say donating to refugee care just makes it too obvious youā€™d be giving money to people who are weird in a bad way.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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      1 month ago

      If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. Itā€™s not just because theyā€™d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldnā€™t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled whoā€™d be permanently mentally stunted.

      wat

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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        1 month ago

        If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. Itā€™s not just because theyā€™d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldnā€™t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled whoā€™d be permanently mentally stunted.

        wat

        This entire fucking shrimp paragraph is what failing philosophy does to a mf

        • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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          29 days ago

          I think the author is just honestly trying to equivocate freezing shrimps with torturing weirdly specifically disabled babies and senile adults medieval style. If you said youā€™d pledge like 17$ to shrimp welfare for every terminated pregnancy Iā€™m sure theyā€™d be perfectly fine with it.

          I happened upon a thread in the EA forums started by someone who was trying to argue EAs into taking a more forced-birth position and what it came down to was that it wouldnā€™t be as efficient as using the same resources to advocate for animal welfare, due to some perceived human/chicken embryo exchange rate.

        • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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          28 days ago

          No, just replace all your sense of morality with utilitarian shrimp algebra. If you end up vegetarian, so be it.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      1 month ago

      Trolley Problem Meme - 34 shrimp vs 1 human

      Not that Iā€™m a super fan of the fact that shrimp have to die for my pasta, but it feels weird that they just pulled a 3% number out of a hat, as if morals could be wrapped up in a box with a bow tied around it so you donā€™t have to do any thinking beyond 1500Ɨ0.03Ɨ1 dollars means I should donate to this guys shrimp startup instead of the food bank!

      • bitofhope@awful.systems
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        1 month ago

        Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          28 days ago

          Hold it right there criminal scum!

          spoiler

          Image of two casually dressed guys pointing fingerguns at the camera, green beams are coming out of the fingerguns. The Vegan Police from the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. The cops are played by Thomas Jane and Clifton Collins Jr, the latter is wearing sunglasses, while it is dark.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      1 month ago

      Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like itā€™s crucial to the overall argument:

      ā€¦ if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ā€¦

      Does this proposition make sense? Itā€™s not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.

      It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe Iā€™m too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

      lol hahah.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      1 month ago

      Ah you see, the moment you entered the realm of numbers and estimates, youā€™ve lost! I activate my trap card: 怌Bayesian Reasoning怍 to Explain Away those numbers. This lets me draw the怌Domain Expert怍 card from my deck, which I place in the epistemic status position, which boosts my confidence by 2000 IQ points!

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        30 days ago

        Obviously mathematically comparing suffering is the wrong framework to apply here. I propose a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics. The best shrimp is a tasty one, the best man is a philosopher-king who agrees with everything I say, and the best EA never gets past drunkenly ranting at their fellow undergrads.