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

2025-08-31 23:00:24

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th September 2025

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.)

Bad people who spend too long on social media call normies NPCs as in video-game NPCs who follow a closed behavioural loop. Wikipedia says this slur was popular with the Twitter far right in October 2018. Two years before that, Maciej Ceglowski warned:

I've even seen people in the so-called rationalist community refer to people who they don't think are effective as ‘Non Player Characters’, or NPCs, a term borrowed from video games. This is a horrible way to look at the world.

Sometime in 2016, an anonymous coward on 4Chan wrote:

I have a theory that there are only a fixed quantity of souls on planet Earth that cycle continuously through reincarnation. However, since the human growth rate is so severe, the soulless extra walking flesh piles around us are NPC’s (sic), or ultimate normalfags, who autonomously follow group think and social trends in order to appear convincingly human.

Kotaku says that this post was rediscovered by the far right in 2018.

Scott Alexander's novel Unsong has an angel tell a human character that there was a shortage of divine light for creating souls so "I THOUGHT I WOULD SOLVE THE MORAL CRISIS AND THE RESOURCE ALLOCATION PROBLEM SIMULTANEOUSLY BY REMOVING THE SOULS FROM PEOPLE IN NORTHEAST AFRICA SO THEY STOPPED HAVING CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCES." He posted that chapter in August 2016 (unsongbook.com). Was he reading or posting on 4chan?

Did any posts on LessWrong use this insult before August 2016?

Edit: In HPMOR by Eliezer Yudkowsky (written in 2009 and 2010), rationalist Harry Potter calls people who don't do what he tells them NPCs. I don't think Yud's Harry says they have no souls but he has contempt for them.

When Tolstoy speaks of Christianity, he's referring to his more objective, philosophical, non-supernatural interpretation of his translation of the Gospels: The Gospel In Brief. For context: reddit.com/r/TolstoysSchoolofL…

This is a direct continuation of Tolstoy's Preface Of His Interpretation Of His Translation Of The Gospels The Gospel In Brief (Part One Of Four): reddit.com/r/TolstoysSchoolofL…

"On the other hand, I ask the reader of my account of the Gospels to remember that if I do not look at the Gospels as holy books that come to us from heaven via the Holy Ghost, I also do not look at the Gospels as if they were merely major works in the history of religious literature. I understand both the divine and the secular view of the Gospels, but I view them differently. Therefore I ask the reader, while reading my account, not to fall into either the church's view or the historical view of the Gospel customary to educated people in recent times, which I did not hold and which I also find incomplete. I do not look at Christianity as a strictly divine revelation, nor as a historical phenomenon, but I look at Christianity as a teaching that gives meaning to life. I was brought to Christianity neither by theological nor historical investigations, but by the fact that fifty years after my birth, having asked myself and all the wise ones in my circle who I am and what the purpose of my life is, I received the answer that I am an accidental clutter of parts, that there is no purpose in life and that life itself is evil. I was brought to Christianity because having received such an answer, I fell into despair and wanted to kill myself; but remembering that before, in childhood, when I believed, there had been a purpose to my life and that the believers who surrounded me—the majority of whom were uncorrupted by riches—lived a real life.

I began to doubt the veracity of the answer that had been given to me via the wisdom of the people in my circle and I attempted to understand the answer that Christianity gives to the people who live this real life. I began to study Christianity and to study that which directs people's lives within the Christian teaching. I began to study the Christianity that I saw applied in daily life and began to compare that applied belief with its source. The source of the Christian teaching was the Gospels, and in these Gospels I came upon an explanation for that meaning that directed the lives of all the people that I saw living the real life. But studying Christianity, I found next to this source of the pure water of life an illegitimate intermixture of dirt and muck that had obscured its purity for me; mingled with the high Christian teaching I found foreign and ugly teachings from church and Hebrew tradition. I was in the position of a man who has received a stinking sack of filth and after much labor and struggle finds that in this sack full of filth, priceless pearls actually lie hidden, a man who realizes that he is not to blame for his feeling of repulsion from the stinking filth and that not only are the people who gathered and preserved these pearls in the dirt not to be blamed, that they are in fact worthy of respect, but a man who nevertheless does not know what he ought to do with those precious things he has found mixed in with the filth. I found myself in this tormented position until I became convinced that the pearls had not fused with the filth and could be cleaned.

I did not know the light and I thought there was no truth in life. But having become convinced that people could only live by this light, I began to seek its source and I found it in the Gospels, despite the false interpretations of the churches. And having arrived at this source of light, I was blinded by it and was given full answers to my questions concerning the meaning of my life and the lives of others, answers that completely harmonized with all the answers from the other cultures familiar to me, answers that, in my opinion, transcended all others.

I sought the answer to the question of life, not to theological or historical questions. Therefore it was completely irrelevant to me whether or not Jesus Christ was God and where the Holy Ghost comes from and so on, and it was equally unimportant and unnecessary to know when and by whom which Gospel and which parable was written and whether or not it could be ascribed to Jesus. To me, what was important was the light which had illuminated eighteen hundred years of humanity and which had illuminated and still illuminates me. However, what to call that light, what its materials are, and who lit it was entirely irrelevant to me.

I began to look deeply into that light and toss away all that was opposed to it, and the further I went along this path, the more undoubtable the difference between truth and falsehood became for me. At the beginning of my work, I still had doubts and there were attempts at artificial explanations, but the further I went, the firmer and clearer the task became and the more irrefutable the truth. I was in the position of a man gathering together the pieces of a broken statue. At the beginning there may still have been uncertainty as to whether a given piece was part of the leg or the arm, but once the legs had been fully reassembled, it became clear that a certain piece probably was not part of the leg and when, moreover, the piece seemed to fit with some other part of the torso and all the fracture lines seemed to align properly with the other pieces, then there could no longer be any doubt. I experienced this as I made forward progress in my work, and unless I am insane, then the reader should also experience that feeling when reading the larger account of the Gospel, where every thesis is confirmed directly by philological considerations, variants, contexts and concordance with the fundamental idea.

We might end the foreword on that point, if only the Gospels were newly revealed books, if the teaching of Christ hadn't undergone eighteen hundred years of false interpretations. But now, in order to understand the true teaching of Christ, as he might have understood it himself, it is important to realize the main reason for these false interpretations that have spoiled the teaching and the main approaches these false interpretations take. The main reason for these false interpretations that have so disfigured the teaching of Christ, to such a degree that it is hard to even see it beneath the layer of fat, is the fact that since the time of Paul, who did not understand Christ's teachings very well and did not hear it as it would later be expressed in the Gospel of Matthew, Christ's teachings have been connected with the pharisaical tradition and by extension all the teachings of the Old Testament. Paul is usually considered the apostle of the gentiles—the apostle of the Protestants. He was that on the surface, in his relationship to circumcision, for example. But the teaching about tradition, about the connection of the Old Testament with the New, was introduced into Christianity by Paul. This very teaching on tradition, this principle of tradition, was the main reason that the Christian teaching was distorted and misread.

The Christian Talmud begins at the time of Paul, calling itself the church, and thus the teaching of Christ ceases to be unified, divine and self-contained, but becomes just one of the links in a chain of revelations which began at the start of the world and which continues in the church up to this time. These false readings refer to Jesus as God. However, professing him to be a God does not prompt them to attribute the words and teaching of this supposed God any more significance than the words they find in the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Acts of the apotles, the Epistles, Revelation or even the collected decrees and writings of the fathers of the church.

These false interpretations allow no other understanding of the teaching of Jesus Christ than what would be in agreement with all preceding and subsequent revelation. So their goal is not to genuinely explain the sense of Christ's sermons, but only to find the least contradictory meaning for all the most hopelessly conflicting writings: the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles, the Acts, i.e., in everything that is considered scripture. With such an approach to Christ's teaching, it is obvious that it would become incomprehensible. All of the innumerable disagreements on how to understand the Gospel flow out of this false approach. One might guess—and guess correctly—that these explanations, which are interested primarily in reconciling the irreconcilable, i.e., the Old and New Testaments, would be innumerable. So, in order to profess this reconciliation as truth we must have recourse to external means: miracles and the visitation of the Holy Ghost." - Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel In Brief, Preface

When Tolstoy speaks of Christianity, he's referring to his more objective, philosophical, non-supernatural interpretation of his translation of the Gospels: The Gospel In Brief. For context: reddit.com/r/TolstoysSchoolofL…

This is a direct continuation of Tolstoy's Preface Of His Interpretation Of His Translation Of The Gospels The Gospel In Brief (Part One Of Four): reddit.com/r/TolstoysSchoolofL…

"On the other hand, I ask the reader of my account of the Gospels to remember that if I do not look at the Gospels as holy books that come to us from heaven via the Holy Ghost, I also do not look at the Gospels as if they were merely major works in the history of religious literature. I understand both the divine and the secular view of the Gospels, but I view them differently. Therefore I ask the reader, while reading my account, not to fall into either the church's view or the historical view of the Gospel customary to educated people in recent times, which I did not hold and which I also find incomplete. I do not look at Christianity as a strictly divine revelation, nor as a historical phenomenon, but I look at Christianity as a teaching that gives meaning to life. I was brought to Christianity neither by theological nor historical investigations, but by the fact that fifty years after my birth, having asked myself and all the wise ones in my circle who I am and what the purpose of my life is, I received the answer that I am an accidental clutter of parts, that there is no purpose in life and that life itself is evil. I was brought to Christianity because having received such an answer, I fell into despair and wanted to kill myself; but remembering that before, in childhood, when I believed, there had been a purpose to my life and that the believers who surrounded me—the majority of whom were uncorrupted by riches—lived a real life.

I began to doubt the veracity of the answer that had been given to me via the wisdom of the people in my circle and I attempted to understand the answer that Christianity gives to the people who live this real life. I began to study Christianity and to study that which directs people's lives within the Christian teaching. I began to study the Christianity that I saw applied in daily life and began to compare that applied belief with its source. The source of the Christian teaching was the Gospels, and in these Gospels I came upon an explanation for that meaning that directed the lives of all the people that I saw living the real life. But studying Christianity, I found next to this source of the pure water of life an illegitimate intermixture of dirt and muck that had obscured its purity for me; mingled with the high Christian teaching I found foreign and ugly teachings from church and Hebrew tradition. I was in the position of a man who has received a stinking sack of filth and after much labor and struggle finds that in this sack full of filth, priceless pearls actually lie hidden, a man who realizes that he is not to blame for his feeling of repulsion from the stinking filth and that not only are the people who gathered and preserved these pearls in the dirt not to be blamed, that they are in fact worthy of respect, but a man who nevertheless does not know what he ought to do with those precious things he has found mixed in with the filth. I found myself in this tormented position until I became convinced that the pearls had not fused with the filth and could be cleaned.

I did not know the light and I thought there was no truth in life. But having become convinced that people could only live by this light, I began to seek its source and I found it in the Gospels, despite the false interpretations of the churches. And having arrived at this source of light, I was blinded by it and was given full answers to my questions concerning the meaning of my life and the lives of others, answers that completely harmonized with all the answers from the other cultures familiar to me, answers that, in my opinion, transcended all others.

I sought the answer to the question of life, not to theological or historical questions. Therefore it was completely irrelevant to me whether or not Jesus Christ was God and where the Holy Ghost comes from and so on, and it was equally unimportant and unnecessary to know when and by whom which Gospel and which parable was written and whether or not it could be ascribed to Jesus. To me, what was important was the light which had illuminated eighteen hundred years of humanity and which had illuminated and still illuminates me. However, what to call that light, what its materials are, and who lit it was entirely irrelevant to me.

I began to look deeply into that light and toss away all that was opposed to it, and the further I went along this path, the more undoubtable the difference between truth and falsehood became for me. At the beginning of my work, I still had doubts and there were attempts at artificial explanations, but the further I went, the firmer and clearer the task became and the more irrefutable the truth. I was in the position of a man gathering together the pieces of a broken statue. At the beginning there may still have been uncertainty as to whether a given piece was part of the leg or the arm, but once the legs had been fully reassembled, it became clear that a certain piece probably was not part of the leg and when, moreover, the piece seemed to fit with some other part of the torso and all the fracture lines seemed to align properly with the other pieces, then there could no longer be any doubt. I experienced this as I made forward progress in my work, and unless I am insane, then the reader should also experience that feeling when reading the larger account of the Gospel, where every thesis is confirmed directly by philological considerations, variants, contexts and concordance with the fundamental idea.

We might end the foreword on that point, if only the Gospels were newly revealed books, if the teaching of Christ hadn't undergone eighteen hundred years of false interpretations. But now, in order to understand the true teaching of Christ, as he might have understood it himself, it is important to realize the main reason for these false interpretations that have spoiled the teaching and the main approaches these false interpretations take. The main reason for these false interpretations that have so disfigured the teaching of Christ, to such a degree that it is hard to even see it beneath the layer of fat, is the fact that since the time of Paul, who did not understand Christ's teachings very well and did not hear it as it would later be expressed in the Gospel of Matthew, Christ's teachings have been connected with the pharisaical tradition and by extension all the teachings of the Old Testament. Paul is usually considered the apostle of the gentiles—the apostle of the Protestants. He was that on the surface, in his relationship to circumcision, for example. But the teaching about tradition, about the connection of the Old Testament with the New, was introduced into Christianity by Paul. This very teaching on tradition, this principle of tradition, was the main reason that the Christian teaching was distorted and misread.

The Christian Talmud begins at the time of Paul, calling itself the church, and thus the teaching of Christ ceases to be unified, divine and self-contained, but becomes just one of the links in a chain of revelations which began at the start of the world and which continues in the church up to this time. These false readings refer to Jesus as God. However, professing him to be a God does not prompt them to attribute the words and teaching of this supposed God any more significance than the words they find in the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Acts of the apotles, the Epistles, Revelation or even the collected decrees and writings of the fathers of the church.

These false interpretations allow no other understanding of the teaching of Jesus Christ than what would be in agreement with all preceding and subsequent revelation. So their goal is not to genuinely explain the sense of Christ's sermons, but only to find the least contradictory meaning for all the most hopelessly conflicting writings: the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles, the Acts, i.e., in everything that is considered scripture. With such an approach to Christ's teaching, it is obvious that it would become incomprehensible. All of the innumerable disagreements on how to understand the Gospel flow out of this false approach. One might guess—and guess correctly—that these explanations, which are interested primarily in reconciling the irreconcilable, i.e., the Old and New Testaments, would be innumerable. So, in order to profess this reconciliation as truth we must have recourse to external means: miracles and the visitation of the Holy Ghost." - Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel In Brief, Preface

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

2025-08-24 23:00:11

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st August 2025 - 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.)

archive.is link

Here’s a short but by no means comprehensive list of items that patrons of Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, can check out for free: A dumpling steamer. Cannoli-making tubes. A ukulele. A heated leg massager. A Happy Birthday sign. Easels. A foam ax throwing game. A KitchenAid mixer, in chrome or red.

Mary Gerber, a retired schoolteacher, borrowed hula hoops and a cornhole game for her son’s 2022 backyard wedding, and, more recently, a spiralizer for her homegrown zucchini. Betty McNally, a retired bookkeeper, routinely borrows a loom and a drop spindle to hand-spin yarn. In late July, she checked out a root slayer to tackle the overly abundant hostas in her yard. She’d had it on hold, because there was a waiting list.

“It feels revolutionary,” Ms. McNally said. “I’m not buying it and storing it and the great thing is it’s really useful but I’m probably only going to use it once or twice. This way, other people can use it. It’s perfection.”

The Library of Things at Curtis Memorial Library was founded in 2018 to make pricey items accessible and encourage people to buy less stuff. It now has more than 1,500 items, all tailored to meet the needs of the roughly 22,600 people who live in Brunswick, as well as nearby Harpswell, which has a population of just over 5,000.

There’s a driving kit with miniature street signs, a lesson book and a sample test to familiarize new drivers and migrants with the rules of the road. Food canners, fruit tree pickers, molds for homemade Popsicles, a food dehydrator and tomato strainers are offered to help people make their own food.