this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

four thieves collective goes on 38C3 and i groan in anticipation of whatever stupid trick will they pull now https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/ASBXWW/ why they even are there

[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state.

JFC

go back 200 years before the "gubmint" got involved in public health and tell me that average life expectancy was better than now

before the pandemic it was possible for people to believe that libertarianism was an answer to everything, turns out if it was a tiny minority would have hoarded all the PPE while the people they were gonna sell it to died of the plague. libertarians have not been able to square this circle since

[–] [email protected] 6 points 14 hours ago

Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health.

I have the feeling that they're not a British trans person talking about the NHS, or an American in a red state panicking about dying of sepsis because the baby they wanted so badly miscarried.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

maybe it's more of a take acceptable for americans

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

The FDA is a response to people just making shit up and selling cough cures full of opium. "Raw milk" pushers are cut from the same cloth.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

idk what went wrong there but village industry of altmed clinics seems to be an actual thing, and from what i understand it's apparently legal in some of red states

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

why they even are there

(from observation over some years) congress orga more than occasionally fucks up on paradox of tolerance by letting shit like this through

it's been a thing I've noticed and have wanted to actually discuss with some folks, but never really gotten to yet on account of life stuff

there were also the much, much less grey-area instances a couple of years back where they were far too open to a number of abusers (this was around the time the appelbaum shit hit wide daylight), so there is a possibility that the issue runs deeper (in a structural sense, at best; personal sense, at worst) too but I possess insufficient information to know one way or the other what exactly may constitute the problem here

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

I don't wanna pull national stereotypes here but aren't Germans really quite open about stuff like homeopathy? "be your own pharmacist" sounds like right up that alley

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Theres a long rich history of German alt med. also (postwar) witch trials, if I can find the book I read on all this I’ll try to post.

Edit: think it was this one https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/128/2/1015/7204469?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

whoah that looks interesting, how can I access it (semi-)legally?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

Its on annas and amazon.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

I haven't really got enough information about that side of it, the details I have to go on are mostly about things particularly around the values CCC has tried to hold/build (and even there I am absolutely not intimately familiar, for reasons of distance and exposure and such)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

never heard of them before. from skimming their wikipedia, it seems their grift is glossing over the details in the "science" part?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

i've complained about them previously https://awful.systems/comment/2754222

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

From what I heard: Skimming over science, best practices, risks of contamination, risk of producing horror chemicals, problems of sourcing materials, storing materials, storing the final product etc etc.

Here is a bsky thread from the last time they were in the publics eye (more here if you dont have an account) (the latter articles are clearly working on a diff definition of capitalism than I use so I chose not to be too annoyed with the weird digs about that).

This should be a very big red flag: "Mixæl Swan Laufer worked in mathematics and high energy physics until he decided to use his background in science to tackle problems of global health and human rights." (Ignoring all the other smaller red flags btw, I think I could point one out ever paragraph, if I had not heard about these people before, the final red pill reference would have made me think they were trolling).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

interesting read, thanks. the red pill reference also had me rolling my eyes. i guess it's more virtue signalling than actually making a change.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

It is a bit weird, it has very high EA vibes to me, started and did some good (epipen in 2017 vs EAs malaria nets), but end up to have some crazy plan for which the other things are more of a smokescreen for their real plans (an easy bake chemical oven make chems at home kit vs EAs stopping our lord and saviour the robotgod) using rethoric aimed at a specific subgroup (2000-2010 anarchist libertarian hackers vs nerdy altruists)

E: I really wonder if they were influenced by the dr sleepless series from the disgraced warren ellis, and the stuff around that.