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. What a year, huh?)
Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)
Starting to get a bit worried people are reinventing stuff like qanon and great evil man theory for Epstein atm. (Not a dig at the people here, but on social media I saw people go act like Epstein created /pol/, lootboxes, gamergate, destroyed gawker (did everyone forget that was Thiel? Mad about how they outed him?) etc. Like only Epstein has agency).
The lesson should be the mega rich are class conscious, dumb as hell, and team up to work on each others interests and dont care about who gets hurt (see how being a pedo sex trafficker wasnt a deal breaker for any of them).
Sorry for the unrelated rant (related: they also got money from Epstein, wonder if that was before or after the sparkling elites article, which was written a few months after Epsteins conviction, june vs sept (not saying those are related btw, just that the article is a nice example of brown-nosing)), but this was annoying me, and posting something like this on bsky while everyone is getting a bit manic about the contents of the files (which seems to not contain a lot of Trump references suddenly) would prob get me some backlash. (That the faked elon rejection email keeps being spread also doesnt help).
I am however also reminded of the Panama papers. (And the unfounded rumors around Marc Dutroux how he was protected by a secret pedophile cult in government, this prob makes me a bit more biasses against those sorts of things).
Sorry had to get it off my chest, but yes it is all very stupid, and I wish there were more consequences for all the people who didnt think his conviction was a deal breaker. (Et tu Chomsky?).
E: note im not saying Yud didnt do sex crimes/sexual abuse. Im complaining about the 'everything is Epstein' conspiracy I see forming.
For an example why this might be a problem: https://bsky.app/profile/joestieb.bsky.social/post/3mdqgsi4k4k2i Joy Gray is ahead of the conspiracy curve here (as all conspiracy theories eventually lead to one thing).
I had to try and talk my wife back from the edge a little bit the other night and explain the difference between reading the published evidence of an actual conspiracy and qanon-style baking. It's so easy to try and turn Epstein into Evil George Soros, especially when the real details we have are truly disturbing.
Yes, and some people when they are reasonably new to discovering stuff like this go a little bit crazy. I had somebody in my bsky mentions who just went full conspiracy theory nut (in the sense of weird caps usage, lot of screenshots of walls of texts, stuff that didn't make sense) about Yarvin (also because I wasn't acting like them they were trying to tell me about Old Moldy, but in a way that made me feel they wanted me to stand next to them on a soapbox and start shouting randomly). I told them acting like a crazy person isn't helping, and I told them they are preaching to the choir. Which of course got me a block. (cherfan75.bsky.social btw, not sure if they toned down their shit). It is quite depressing, literally driving themselves crazy.
And because people blindly follow people who follow them these people can have quite the reach.
Yeah this. It would be nice if people could manage to neither dismiss the extent to which the mega rich work together nor fall into insane conspiracy theories about it.
@scruiser @Soyweiser but all you needed to do was see the list of yachts around St barts on nye to find out very hard not to be a conspiracy theorist. Also to desire a serious US drug boat oopsie.
Also the patriarchy is involved, but my comment was already long enough. (And I didnt mention how nobody seems to talk about the victims in any of this).
@Soyweiser Years ago (before Epstein, before the GFC, etc) I used to jokingly talk about my pet conspiracy theory, that the world was ruled by the P7: the Pale Patriarchal Plutocratic Protestant Penis-People of Power.
Turns out I was right.
I didn't want to be right …
It is not a bad insight, as if you have some of the Ps there is still a place for you in the hierarchy which keeps more people invested in propping it up. (And ideas flow from the bottom to the top as well, as the current genocidal transphobia was much more a Pale Patriarchal thing (the neonazi far right) and the people in power just latched onto that, and added their Ps to it cause it helped them.
And yeah, you have been very tragically blessed with the power of foresight. I recall reading your blog posts a long time ago and thinking you were overreacting a bit. I was wrong.
What did you do to piss off Apollo?
The far right is celebrating Epstein on the other hand. Wild times.
Eliezer’s response is up on reddit
You know, it makes the exact word choices Eliezer chose on this post: https://awful.systems/post/6297291 much more suspicious. "To the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life had sex with anyone under the age of 18." So maybe he didn't know they were underage at the time?
aka the Minsky defense
possible, iirc drugs were also involved so is it possible he got too high and doesn’t remember because of that?
it’s all coming together. every single techbro and current government moron, they all loop back around to epstein in the end
It's a big club and you ain't in it!
at least I have SneerClub
'We have certain things in common Jeffrey'
At this point I'm starting the suspect that they were actually all produced in a lab somewhere on that island
the REAL reason Yudkowsky endorsed the “superbabies” project is so Epstein and his pedophile friends have more kids to fuck. It all makes sense now!
—Deepak Chopra to Jeffrey Epstein
When we use the fart app on our phone we merge with and become hybrids of human conciousness and artificial fartelligence (created by us and therefore of conciousness)
@blakestacey @jaschop fartificial intelligence was right there
It keeps coming back to Gas Town doesnt it?
Somehow, I registered a total lack of surprise as this loaded onto my screen
eagerly awaiting the multi page denial thread
“im saving the world from AI! me talking to epstein doesn’t matter!!!”
€5 say they'll claim he was talking to jefffrey in an effort to stop the horrors.
no not the abuse of minors, he was asking epstein for donations to stop AGI, and it's morally ethical to let rich abusers get off scott free if that's the cost of them donating money to charitable causes such as the alignment problem /s
I dont like how I can envision this and find it perfectly plausible
I'm looking forward to the triple layered glomarization denial.
—Charles L. Harper Jr., formerly a big wheel at the Templeton foundation
I take it you haven't heard of miricult.com, because this isn't the first time evidence has come out of Yudkowsky being a pedophile. Some of us even know the identity of the victim.
Still, crazy that Yudkowsky was (successfully) blackmailed for pedophilia in 2014 but still kept it up
Its not just a Yud thing - I've been told its baked into the culture of the Rationalist grouphouse scene(they like to take in young runaways you see).
I am just over here mouthing "what the fuck"
over and over again
“(((We’re))) never beating the allegations, are we?” -my wife
John Brockman, October 19, 2016
Reading the e-mails involving Brockman really creates the impression that he worked diligently to launder Epstein's reputation. An editor at Scientific American I noticed when looking up where Carl Zimmer was mentioned seemed to be doing the same thing... One thing people might be missing in the hubbub now is just how much "reputation management"—i.e., enabling— was happening after his conviction. A lot of money went into that, and he had a lot of willing co-conspiritors. Look at what filtered down to his Wikipedia page by the beginning of 2011, which is downstream of how the media covered his trial and the sweetheart deal that Avila made to betray the victims... It's all philanthropy this and generosity that, until a "Solicitation of prostitution" section that makes it sound like he maybe slept with a 17-year-old who claimed to be 18... And look, he only had to serve 18 months! He can't have done anything that bad, could he?
There's a tier of people who should have goddamn known better and whose actions were, in ways that only become more clear with time, evil. And the uncomfortable truth is that evil won, not just in that the victims never saw justice in a court of law, but in that the cover-up worked. The Avilas and the Brockmans did their job, and did it well. The researchers who pursued Epstein for huge grants and actively lifted Epstein up (Nowak and co.), hoo boy are they culpable. But the very fact of all that uplifting and enabling means that the people who took one meeting because Brockman said he'd introduce them to a financier who loved science... rushing to blame them all, with the fragmentary record we have, diverts the blame from those most responsible.
Maybe another way to say the above: We're learning now about a lot of people who should have known better. But we are also learning about the mechanisms by which too many were prevented from knowing better.
For example, I think Yudkowsky looks worse now than he did before. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the worst we knew prior to fhis was that the Singularity Institute had accepted money from a foundation that Epstein controlled. On 19 October 2016, Epstein's Wikipedia bio gets to sex crimes in sentence three. And the "Solicitation of prostitution" section includes this:
At this point, I don't care if John Brockman dismissed Epstein's crimes as an overblown peccadillo when he introduced you.
Yes, in the 2016 emails Yudkowsky hints that he knows Epstein has a reputation for pursuing underage girls and would still like his money. We don't know what he knew about Epstein in 2009, but he sure seemed to know that something was wrong with the man in 2016. And that makes it harder to put Yud's writings about the age of consent in a good light (hard to believe that he was just thinking of a sixteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old, and had never imagined a middle-aged man assaulting fourteen-year-olds).
"Friday? We're meeting at Jeffrey's Thursday night" ---Stuart "consciousness is a series of quantum tubes" Hameroff
no fucking way