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)

    • ahopefullycuterrobot@awful.systemsEnglish
      0Ā·
      2 months ago

      Iā€™m 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. Heā€™s been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think heā€™s even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, Iā€™m 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 Iā€™ve 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 Iā€™m pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I havenā€™t seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonaldā€™s another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evanā€™s account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesnā€™t 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.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        1Ā·
        2 months ago

        Yeah, Krugman appearing on the roster surprised me too. While I havenā€™t pored over everything heā€™s blogged and microblogged, he hasnā€™t 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 itā€™s largely about inherited talent: smart people make lots of money, and also have smart kids.

        But, you know, thereā€™s lots of evidence that thereā€™s 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.

        Itā€™s comforting to think that we live in a meritocracy. But we donā€™t.

        And in 2014:

        There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.ā€™s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that heā€™s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what heā€™s talking about.

        So itā€™s comical, in a way, to see [Paul] Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a ā€œculture, 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 ā€œinarticulate.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 itā€™s possible that he was invited to an e-mail list in the late '90s and never bothered to unsubscribe, or something like that.