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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Stackslobber posts evidence that transhumanism is a literal cult, HN crowd is not having it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459990
I used to think transhumanism was very cool because escaping the misery of physical existence would be great. for one thing, Iām trans, and my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim. transhumanism to my understanding promised the liberation of hundreds of millions from actual oppression.
then I found out there was literally no reason to expect mind uploading or any variation thereof to be possible. and when you think about what else transhumanism is, thereās nothing to get excited about. these people donāt have any ideas or cogent analysis, just a powerful desire to evade limitations. itās inevitable that to the extent they cohere theyāre a cult: theyāre a variety of sovereign citizen
I havenāt spent a lot of time sneering at transhumanism, but it always sounded like thinly veiled ableism to me.
Only as a subset of the broader problem. What if, instead of creating societies in which everyone can live and prosper, we created people who can live and prosper in the late capitalist hell weāve already created! And what if we embraced the obvious feedback loop that results and call the trillions of disposable wireheaded drones that weāve created a utopia because of how high theyāll be able to push various meaningless numbers!
(side note, gender affirming care resolved this. in my case HRT didnāt really help by itself, but facial feminization surgery immediately cured my dysphoria. also for some reason it cured my lower back pain)
(of course it wasnāt covered in any way, which represents exactly the sort of hostility to bodily agency transhumanists would prioritize over ten foot long electric current sensing dongs or whatever, if they were serious thinkers)
Wanting to escape the fact that we are beings of the flesh seems to be behind so much of the rationalist-reactionary impulse ā a desire to one-up our mortal shells by eugenics, weird diets, ābrain uploadingā and something like vampirism with the Bryan Johnson guy. Itās wonderful you found a way to embrace and express yourself instead! Yes, in a healthier relationship with our bodies ā which is what we are ā such changes would be considered part of general healthcare. It sometimes appears particularly extreme in the US from here from Europe at least, maybe a heritage of puritanical norms.
(Geordi LaForge holding up a hand in a āstopā gesture) transhumanism
(Geordi LaForge pointing as if to say "now thereās an idea) trans humanism
Hereās the link, so you can read Stackās teardown without giving orange site traffic:
https://ewanmorrison.substack.com/p/the-tranhumanist-cult-test
Note I am not endorsing their writing - in fact I believe the vehemence of the reaction on HN is due to the author being seen as one of them.
I read through a couple of his fiction pieces and I think we can safely disregard him. Whatever insights he may have into technology and authoritarianism appear to be pretty badly corrupted by a predictable strain of antiwokism. Itās not offensive in anything I read - heās not out here whining about not being allowed to use slurs - but he seems sufficiently invested in how authoritarians might use the concerns of marginalized people as a cudgel that he completely misses how in reality marginalized people are more useful to authoritarian structures as a target than a weapon.