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 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. I’ll let Dr. Abeba Birhane’s horrified reaction do the talking:

    this just started and i’m already losing my mind and screaming

    Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan”

    just fucking shoot me

    Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.

    • Nicole Parsons@mstdn.social
      0·
      21 hours ago

      @BlueMonday1984

      The stages of genocide:

      1. Classification
      2. Symbolization
      3. Dehumanization
      4. Discrimination
      5. Organization
      6. Polarization
      7. Preparation
      8. Persecuted
      9. Extermination
      10. Denial

      AI is the perfect vehicle for genocide

      https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages

      The oil industry estimates 1 billion famine deaths from climate change & they are flooding AI with investment

      “The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines”
      Frank Herbert

    • FoolishOwl@social.coop
      0·
      1 day ago

      @BlueMonday1984 If Edward Said were still with us, this would be worth another chapter in Orientalism. It’s another instance of displacing actual people with a constructed fantasy of them, “othering” them.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      Uber but for vitrue signalling (*).

      (I joke, because other remarks I want to make will get me in trouble).

      *: I know this term is very RW coded, but I don’t think it is that bad, esp when you mean it like ‘an empty gesture with a very low cost that does nothing except for signal that the person is virtuous.’ Not actually doing more than a very small minimum should be part of the definition imho. Stuff like selling stickers you are pro some minority group but only 0.05% of each sale goes to a cause actually helping that group.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        21 hours ago

        I mean “the right” has managed to corrupt all kinds of fine phrases into dog whistles. I think “virtue signalling” as you have formulated it is a valid observation and criticism of someone’s actions. I blame “liberals” for posturing and virtue signalling as leftist, giving the right easy opportunities to score points.