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 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
EVE Online creator CCP announces a new game with BLOCKCHAIN and itās not going well:
Apparently they got investment from A16Z:
In 3 years they will release their NFT game.
I admit, in my haste, I read that link as Marc Andreessen openly announcing theyāre investing in the Chinese Communist Party, which is slightly funnier than the reality of yet another crypto game.
so mozilla decided to take the piss while begging for $10 donations:
We know $10 USD may not seem like enough to reclaim the internet and take on irresponsible tech companies. But the truth is that as you read this email, hundreds of Mozilla supporters worldwide are making donations. And when each one of us contributes what we can, all those donations add up fast.
With the rise of AI and continued threats to online privacy, the stakes of our movement have never been higher. And supporters like you are the reason why Mozilla is in a strong position to take on these challenges and transform the future of the internet.
the rise of AI you say! wow that sounds awful, itās so good Mozilla isnāt very recently notorious for pushing that exact thing on their users without their consent alongside other privacy-violating changes. what a responsible tech company!
Timnit Gebru on Twitter:
We received feedback from a grant application that included āWhile your impact metrics & thoughtful approach to addressing systemic issues in AI are impressive, some reviewers noted the inherent risks of navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players,ā
navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players
stares into middle distance, hollow laugh
Paul Krugman and Francis Fukuyama and Daniel Dennett and Steve Pinker were in a āhuman biodiversity discussion groupā with Steve Sailer and Ron Unz in 1999, because of course they were
Iām mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.
Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. Heās been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think heās even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, Iām curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.
Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But Iāve never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.
Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since Iām pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I havenāt seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonaldās another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evanās account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesnāt emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.
Yeah, Krugman appearing on the roster surprised me too. While I havenāt pored over everything heās blogged and microblogged, he hasnāt sent up red flags that I recall. E.g., here he is in 2009:
Oh, Kay. Greg Mankiw looks at a graph showing that children of high-income families do better on tests, and suggests that itās largely about inherited talent: smart people make lots of money, and also have smart kids.
But, you know, thereās lots of evidence that thereās more to it than that. For example: students with low test scores from high-income families are slightly more likely to finish college than students with high test scores from low-income families.
Itās comforting to think that we live in a meritocracy. But we donāt.
There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.ās de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that heās a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what heās talking about.
So itās comical, in a way, to see [Paul] Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a āculture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.ā He was, he says, simply being āinarticulate.ā How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars ā people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.
I suppose itās possible that he was invited to an e-mail list in the late '90s and never bothered to unsubscribe, or something like that.
