Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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. Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and happy holidays in general!)
We have a new odium symposium episode. This week we talk about Ayn Rand, who turned out to be much much more loathsome than i expected.
available everywhere (see www.odiumsymposium.com). patreon episode link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/haters-v-ayn-146272391
Catching up and I want to leave a Gödel comment. First, correct usage of Gödel’s Incompleteness! Indeed, we can’t write down a finite set of rules that tells us what is true about the world; we can’t even do it for natural numbers, which is Tarski’s Undefinability. These are all instances of the same theorem, Lawvere’s Fixed-Point. Cantor’s theorem is another instance of Lawvere’s theorem too. In my framing, previously, on Awful, postmodernism in mathematics was a movement from 1880 to 1970 characterized by finding individual instances of Lawvere’s theorem. This all deeply undermines Rand’s Objectivism by showing that either it must be uselessly simple and unable to deal with real-world scenarios or it must be so complex that it must have incompleteness and paradoxes that cannot be mechanically resolved.
I’m pretty sure that Atlas Shrugged is actually just cursed and nobody has ever finished it. John Galt’s speech gets two pages longer whenever you finish one.
And I think the challenge with engaging with Rand as a fiction author is that, put bluntly, she is bad at writing fiction. The characters and their world don’t make any sense outside of the allegorical role they play in her moral and political philosophy, which means you’re not so much reading a good story with thought behind it as much as it’s a philosophical treatise that happens in the form of dialogue. It’s a story in the same way that Plato’s Republic is a story, but the Republic can actually benefit from understanding the context of the different speakers at least as a historical text.