Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd February 2026
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Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine's Day!)
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Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine's Day!)
A little exchange on the EA forums I thought was notable: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EDBQPT65XJsgszwmL/long-term-risks-from-ideological-fanaticism?commentId=b5pZi5JjoMixQtRgh
tldr; a super long essay lumping together Nazism, Communism and religious fundamentalism (I didn't read it, just the comments). The comment I linked notes how liberal democracies have also killed a huge number of people (in the commenter's home country, in the name of purging communism):
The United States presented liberal democracy as a universal emancipatory framework while materially supporting anti-communist purges in my country during what is often called the “Jakarta Method". Between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in 1965–66, with encouragement and intelligence support from Western powers. Variations of this model were later replicated in parts of Latin America.
The OP's response is to try to explain how that wasn't real "liberal democracy" and to try to reframe the discussion. Another commenter is even more direct, they complain half the sources listed are Marxist.
A bit bold to unqualifiedly recommend a list of thinkers of which ~half were Marxists, on the topic of ideological fanaticism causing great harms.
I think it's a bit bold of this commenter to ignore the empirical facts cited in how many people 'liberal democracies' had killed and to exclude sources simply for challenging your ideology.
Just another reminder of how the EA movement is full of right wing thinking and how most of it hasn't considered even the most basic of leftist thought.
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A little exchange on the EA forums I thought was notable: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EDBQPT65XJsgszwmL/long-term-risks-from-ideological-fanaticism?commentId=b5pZi5JjoMixQtRgh
tldr; a super long essay lumping together Nazism, Communism and religious fundamentalism (I didn't read it, just the comments). The comment I linked notes how liberal democracies have also killed a huge number of people (in the commenter's home country, in the name of purging communism):
The United States presented liberal democracy as a universal emancipatory framework while materially supporting anti-communist purges in my country during what is often called the “Jakarta Method". Between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in 1965–66, with encouragement and intelligence support from Western powers. Variations of this model were later replicated in parts of Latin America.
The OP's response is to try to explain how that wasn't real "liberal democracy" and to try to reframe the discussion. Another commenter is even more direct, they complain half the sources listed are Marxist.
A bit bold to unqualifiedly recommend a list of thinkers of which ~half were Marxists, on the topic of ideological fanaticism causing great harms.
I think it's a bit bold of this commenter to ignore the empirical facts cited in how many people 'liberal democracies' had killed and to exclude sources simply for challenging your ideology.
Just another reminder of how the EA movement is full of right wing thinking and how most of it hasn't considered even the most basic of leftist thought.
@scruiser @BlueMonday1984 funny how they mock left wingers for «that wasn't real communism» and then come up with the same excuses for liberal democracies and capitalism whenever one points out all the shit that came out of that. It's really ALWAYS projection with them, isn't it?
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@scruiser @BlueMonday1984 funny how they mock left wingers for «that wasn't real communism» and then come up with the same excuses for liberal democracies and capitalism whenever one points out all the shit that came out of that. It's really ALWAYS projection with them, isn't it?
This reminds me of a discussion I had recently on a fanfic discord (the discussion was sparked by the March for Billionaires...). Someone claimed no country had ever pulled itself out of poverty except by capitalism, so I bring up China and the USSR, but apparently those don't count for the person I was arguing with. They claimed the stats were Goodharted and also that what I was saying was tankie bullshit. I gave up at that point (I probably shouldn't have bothered in the first place). Like how exactly did they fake or Goodhart going from literal feudalism to industrial superpowers? Also, I find it notable how EAs and "The Better Angels of Our Nature" type neoliberals are perfectly happy to use overall stats as metrics when it makes a point they are in favor of. "Your GDP went up 3.2%, please ignore the mass environmental devastation from colonialism and neocolonialism that makes your traditional way of life unlivable and thank us Westerners."
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This reminds me of a discussion I had recently on a fanfic discord (the discussion was sparked by the March for Billionaires...). Someone claimed no country had ever pulled itself out of poverty except by capitalism, so I bring up China and the USSR, but apparently those don't count for the person I was arguing with. They claimed the stats were Goodharted and also that what I was saying was tankie bullshit. I gave up at that point (I probably shouldn't have bothered in the first place). Like how exactly did they fake or Goodhart going from literal feudalism to industrial superpowers? Also, I find it notable how EAs and "The Better Angels of Our Nature" type neoliberals are perfectly happy to use overall stats as metrics when it makes a point they are in favor of. "Your GDP went up 3.2%, please ignore the mass environmental devastation from colonialism and neocolonialism that makes your traditional way of life unlivable and thank us Westerners."
@scruiser there's no winning with these guys. I had a similar experience with someone bringing up South Korea as an example of country that brought itself up by its bootstraps via unfettered capitalism because “planned economy doesn't work”, so I had to remind them that SK was a military dictatorship who implemented 5-year plans leveraging billions of foreign investment that was given to it by US to prop it up against NK.
