Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th May 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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.)

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.)

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    everybody’s loving Adam Conover, the comedian skeptic who previously interviewed Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, organized as part of the last writer’s strike, and generally makes a lot of somewhat left-ish documentary videos and podcasts for a wide audience

    5 seconds later

    we regret to inform you that Adam Conover got paid to do a weird ad and softball interview for Worldcoin of all things and is now trying to salvage his reputation by deleting his Twitter posts praising it under the guise of pseudo-skepticism

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7·
      23 hours ago

      I suspect Adam was just getting a bit desperate for money. He hasn’t done anything significant since his Adam Ruins Everything days and his pivot to somewhat lefty-union guy on youtube can’t be bringing all that much advertising money.

      Unfortunately he’s discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.

      • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        Unfortunately he’s discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.

        I think its accurate to just say that someone who is well known for reporting on exposing bullshit by various companies who then shills bullshit for a company, shows they aren’t always accurate.

        It then also enables people to question if they got something else wrong on other topics. “Was he wrong about X? Did Y really happened or was it fluffed up for a good story? Did Z happen? The company has some documents that show they didn’t intend for it to happen.”

        There’s a skeptic podcast I liked that had its host federally convicted for wire fraud.

        Dunning co-founded Buylink, a business-to-business service provider, in 1996, and served at the company until 2002. He later became eBay’s second-biggest affiliate marketer;[3] he has since been convicted of wire fraud through a cookie stuffing scheme, for his company fraudulently obtaining between $200,000 and $400,000 from eBay. In August 2014, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison, followed by three years of supervision.

        I took it if he was willing to aid in scamming customers, he is willing to aid in scamming or lying to listeners.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          Absolutely, the fact that his whole reputation is built around exposing people and practices like these, makes this so much worse. People are willing to (somewhat) swallow some gamer streamer endorsing some shady shit in order to keep food on their plate, but people don’t tolerate their skeptics selling them bullshit.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        22 hours ago

        “just”?

        “unfortunately”?

        that’s a hell of a lot of leeway being extended for what is very easily demonstrably credulous PR-washing

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        me too. this heel turn is disappointing as hell, and I suspected fuckery at first, but the video excerpts Rebecca clipped and Conover’s actions on Twitter since then make it pretty clear he did this willingly.