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)

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    18Ā·
    1 month ago

    Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, itā€™s even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didnā€™t help.

    Very serious people at HN at it again:

    The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someoneā€™s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

    Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like ā€œsexual harassment is not a real crimeā€ or ā€œwe shouldnā€™t give our employees raises because otherwise theyā€™ll soon demand infinite payā€ or ā€œthereā€™s no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isnā€™t going to damage the reputation of the organization I leadā€ youā€™re a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

    Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      15Ā·
      1 month ago

      The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someoneā€™s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

      What do these people think leadership is?

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        18Ā·
        1 month ago

        No, obviously opinions like

        • ā€œif my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epsteinā€™s teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consentedā€,
        • ā€œstealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most itā€™s supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fineā€,
        • ā€œI donā€™t believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? Itā€™s conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.1 What if you lie about who is dying?ā€,
        • ā€œOvertly sexualizing ā€˜parodyā€™ ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there isā€,
        • ā€œItā€™s fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so itā€™s basically proprietary, right?ā€,
        • ā€œYou may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>ā€,

        are in the same category as ā€œI think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgustingā€ when it comes to evaluating someoneā€™s aptitude as a leader.

        I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I donā€™t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that Iā€™d be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.

        1: Itā€™s conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out itā€™s conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).

      • Evinceo@awful.systemsEnglish
        9Ā·
        1 month ago

        Especially leadership of a political organization thatā€™s basically just there to turn his opinions into code and publish his essays.