Want to wade into the sandy 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 you’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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Hey, remember Sabine Hossenfelder? The transphobe who makes YouTube videos? She published a physics paper! Well, OK, she posted a thing to the arXiv for the first time since January 2024. I read it, because I've been checking the quant-ph feed on a daily basis for years now, and reading anything else is even more depressing. It's vague, meandering glorp that tries to pretty up a worldview that amounts to renouncing explanation and saying everything happens because Amon-Ra wills it. Two features are worth commenting upon. The acknowledgments say,
"Tee hee, I shut off my higher brain functions" is a statement that should remain in the porn for those who have a fetish for that.
And what literature does Hossenfelder cite? Well, there's herself, of course, and Tim Palmer (one of those guys who did respectable work in his own field and then decided to kook out about quantum mechanics). And ... Eric Weinstein! The very special boy who dallied for a decade before writing a paper on his revolutionary theory and then left his equations in his other pants. Yes, Hossenfelder has gone from hosting a blog post that dismantled "Geometric Unity" to citing it as a perfectly ordinary theory.
If she's not taking Thielbux, she's missing an opportunity.
Eric "my new theory of physics has not maths in it" Weinstein?
Eric "I will come to Harvard and espouse Numberwang Racism if you deign to invite me" Weinstein:
You've got to be shitting me.
Edit: maybe all these weirdos in the techfash groupchat are experimenting with the wrong nootropics and gave themselves brain damage. They all seem to be unravelling simultaneously.
In using xcancel to look up Eric Weinstein's bonkers rants on Xitter, I exposed myself to Sabine Hossenfelder's comment section. The drivel, the fawning, the people asking chatbots about quantum gravity... It hurts, it hurts.
I am going to scrub my brain with Oliver Byrne's edition of Euclid.