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.)
Blast from the past: in 2014, Scott Alexander posted a take on marijuana legalization which showed excellent knowledge of medical papers but huge gaps in his knowledge of what brown people or smart policy reformers have to say. David Gerard and Christopher Hallquist in the comments, digression on how pot affects your IQ with gwern chipping in. Alexander came back in 2018 promising that he was right all along with a footnote about how some people in the comments told him that people like smoking weed and he did not know how to process that because his utilitarian calculation said it was bad for society.
It's curious how, in terms of utilitarianism, the 2014 post has people doing arithmetic to estimate QALYs but the 2018 post is more of a handwave where Scoot repeats the 2014 numbers verbatim. Advocates of decriminalization and legalization have long argued that the QALYs saved by releasing people from prison and no longer sentencing them (easily 20+ QALYs/person) and not arresting people for possession in the first place (0.5 QALYs/person-arrest) are significant to society at large, even if there were quantifiable health risks.
TBH I think that Scoot got a bit of a tough surprise when data actually came in on cannabis usage; it's now accepted cannabis lore that cannabis can cause onset of e.g. schizophrenia, at a rate of something like 1 in 2000 users, but the numbers on causing cancer never materialized. Meanwhile the case studies treating e.g. epilepsy have multiplied to the point where, again, it's now accepted lore that some epileptics find relief by using products made from high-CBD strains.
Choice sneer from the second post, from somebody with an extremely-relevant Moray avatar:
Edit: grammar and also the extremely-relevant link. Pass the Moray, please~
I didn't know that Moray in QC was around in 2018!
That is a good example because it shows the failure of imagination (can imagine the end of the world, can't imagine working public transit and public policy to discourage driving) and because hf he thought it through he might get to "humh, some people like to drive, but its bad for public and social health, how can we discourage it while preserving liberties?"
I really wonder what he did as a medical student in Cork other than study and read racist Tumblr accounts. Did his friends never drag him to Amsterdam to ride a bike and eat an edible?
Another surprise is that illegal weed still has 30% of the market in Canada. I don't know how much of that is consumer inertia ("My buddy Mike always gets me the good stuff eh") and how much is avoiding taxes.