What a twat. “It’s much harder to bullshit people than to be rigorous and skeptical guys. Not only is everything fine, I’m actually a better person than ALL my critics”

Yeah, that is really depressing.

I think it’s a sunk cost thing for the authors, but also it could be fear of coming off as “disgruntled” to people they’re hoping to communicate with. They still have hope of changing these communities, but they know these communities are very hostile and dismissive towards any criticism, especially criticism from perceived “enemies”. They also don’t want to lose whatever power and respect they have in those communities. So emphasising how great these groups are and how smart all the members are and how much they got out of being a member is a tactic to try and get around all that hostility. They want to flatter the remaining members enough that they’ll retain their respect for them. Which in itself is a sad comment on the attitudes common in these communities.

Having said all that, the poor man is not long out of a cult and has taken a big step by publicly blowing the whistle. That takes some backbone.

What these people do is they take something that’s vaguely true or at least has a kernel of truth in it and they give it the most sensationalistic and negative spin possible. So it can’t be “there were upsides and downsides to the switchover from incandescent bulbs”, it has to be “the greatest uglification in history”, and anyone who points out the energy saving advantages of LEDs and fluorescent lightbulbs is just trying to Silence You and smear you. It’s so wretched.

I knew some people who lived in Switzerland for a bit and they joked that it was a libertarian paradise because you can drink and smoke when you’re a teenager, the age of consent is 16 and everyone is issued a gun as part of their military service. I didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously…

Afaik Switzerland does have a unique system of federated democratic governance, one of the oldest democratic systems in Europe. The downside is that women weren’t able to vote in some Swiss cantons until the 90s.

Fire accidents seem to have the unique combination of producing extremely strong emotional responses by people in a local community, while also often being traceable to an o-ring like failure that you can over-index on.

Gee, why would people get emotional about friends and family being burnt alive. How bizarre.

Also I am not a fire expert by any means whatsoever and maybe I’m missing this guy’s point. But pretty much every account I have ever read of a fire that killed a lot of people is like “the building did not meet fire safety standards and the management had been dodging calls from the fire safety inspectors. Multiple people said the building was unsafe. On the night the fire happened the fire exits were chained shut.” Like, read about this horrendous fire that happened near where I live. There is no need to bring up o-rings. Fires in residential buildings and entertainment venues are not the same as fires on NASA spaceships.

Also fire codes do not control the size of fire engines. That’s a bad decision made by firefighters.

There’s a Baudrillard one as well. I have a copy of the feminism one and I think it’s actually very good although very 90s

I don’t know very much about Nietzsche (I never finished reading my cartoon guide to Nietzsche), but I’m still pretty sure this isn’t Nietzsche

More like that cunt who pioneered leaded petrol and CFCs.

[levels of sneer unsafe for human exposure]

SNEER!

Sneer!

I can’t give this the sneer it deserves. More pics will follow

the AI Eater Speaks in a new interview.

What a great creature. Big ears, for hearing people say stupid things about AI.

This article genuinely made me furious on this woman’s behalf. It isn’t like most scenes or spaces are great at handling sexual violence, but in most spaces people would not accuse you of trying to silence and hurt men by saying you were groped!

Good website too

In the same way that in France, separation of church and state sounds good on paper but means “local government will still sponsor nativity scenes but schoolchildren will be banned from wearing hijabs” in practice.

definitely. plus the woman-hating background radiation of a lot of online communities and media for teenage boys.

i was aware of “left-wing but rancid about women” as a common political perspective in techy fields, but I wasn’t aware of many out and out right-wingers in the FOSS world specifically (beyond the odd TempleOS type kook).

I’ve always thought of linux as a vaguely commie thing but it seems like a) there were more libertarians in there than I thought, b) using linux appeals to some very right wing freaks who don’t like the idea of not being in total control, and c) there’s a right wing computer culture promoted by online influencers to nerdy young men, not dissimilar to right wing gamer culture.

The above site is hosted on neocities. I’ve been involved in the small web/personal web/indie web for a while (almost 6 years now, Jesus) and I knew there’s a more right wing side to it but I hadn’t come across it much (except for digdeeper linked to above, whose online privacy guides I read and took seriously before he started posting about Covid and I realized he was a conspiracy theorist). Then recently I found a neonazi’s site on neocities through a Christian webring* and spent a while looking around in morbid fascination.

*You can’t join if you support abortion or gay people, but apparently they don’t check to make sure you’re not a Nazi. I’m tempted to set up a competing webring for Christians with normal views…