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 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.
(Last substack for 2025 - may 2026 bring better tidings. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
@cstross @mirrorwitch In a bunch of ways, the unspeakable 19th and 20th centuries of Chinese history are constructed as the consequences of powerlessness; the point is to do a magic to abolish all traces of powerlessness.
Retaking control of Taiwan is not a question and cannot be a question. Policy toward Taiwan is not what Hong Kong got, they're going to get what the Uyghur are getting. (The official stance on democracy is roughly the medieval Church's stance on heresy.)
Im not an expert on this, but wasnt this period not that bad and it was more the early modern period where the trouble really started? (Esp the witch hunts, and also the organized church was actually not as bad re the witch hunts, the Spanish inquisition didn't consider confessions gotten via torture valid for example, and it was an early modern thing). The medieval period tends to get a bad rap.
E: I was wrong, see below.
@Soyweiser You've forgotten the Crusades, right? Right? Or the Clifford's Tower Massacre (to get hyper-specific in English history) and similar events all over Europe? Or the Reconquista and the Alhambra Decree?
The crusades/Reconquusta were more an externally aimed thing at the Muslims right? (at least in intent from the organized church side, in practice not so much, so im not talking about those rampages). So yeah I was specifically talking about heresies, and im also very much not an expert in these things, so I dont know. I have not forgotten about the Cliffords/ /Alhambra things, as I dont know about it (I will look them up when im not phone posting). I was thinking more about stuff like protestantism, witch hunts and Jan Hus (the latter does count, as it is from the late medieval period iirc).
I just dont know very much about the period, but do knew some wiccan types who had wild ahistorical stories about the witch hunts.
E: yeah, I don't think we should put anti-semitism under anti-heresy stuff, it being its own religion and all that. But as Graydon mentioned, the Albigensian Crusade fully counts for all my weird hangups and so I was totally wrong.
@Soyweiser @techtakes Nope. The Albigensian Crusade rampaged through the Languedoc (southern France, as it is now) and genocided the Cathars. Numerous lesser organized pogroms massacred Jews al fresco and butchered Muslims and Pagans living under Christian rule. The Alhambra Decree outlawed Islam and Judaism in Spain and set up a Holy Inquisition to persecute them: Richard III expelled all the Jews from England (he owed some of them money): and so on.
Wasn't it Edward I who expelled the Jews from England?
@blakestacey @cstross I think the Jews were expelled from England more than once... Kings preferred it to declaring bankruptcy.
Seems my edit and your reply crossed each other. No I agree, I was wrong in all the ways, thanks for the correction and information.
@Soyweiser Bear in mind that the Middle Ages (roughly 500 years!) is a longer span of time than, say, from the founding of the English and French colonies in North America to the present day, close to the Spanish/Portuguese colonization of South America. And similarly huge in extent. Lots of places/times in the Middle Ages *were* peaceful and tolerant (by the standards of the day).
Yeah I was also ver specifically thinking about Christian heresies, and not counting all the other religious wars/conflicts/murders going round.
Do always think it is funny that the whole magical staves thing which people think is some old norse early medieval thing comes from the 17th century and is a bit more christian (even if it is a strange offshoot, esp with iceland being mostly converted to Christianity in the 1000s). But that is unrelated to everything above, more that history is big and what we assume is often not correct and from the wrong periods. As I did here myself. Edit: wonder if there is an overlap between the staves and the sigils from The Lesser Key of Solomon, both of the sources for these things seems to be written in the same period (the lesser key is based on earlier works from what I could tell the sigils itself are always credited to the lesser key, so no idea if they predate that, I don't have much access to grimoires from the 1500s).