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.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn't it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
So just a couple things before the rest of this comment:
I spent about five minutes trying to see what I could find out. I looked up a few “intactivist” organisations and, at risk of poisoning my algorithms forever, looked at their socials and who they followed. I don’t think I really found out anything that interesting, except that a lot of them follow daniel “tosh.0” tosh? He probably platformed some of them at some point. Otherwise, I think in terms of what is organisationally there, it’s a little too fringe to be “driven primarily” by any particular cultural faction.
E: adding that when I think about it, I’ve seen intactivists presented in two tv shows as fringe weirdos. I think the editors of the shows chose to focus just on the views surrounding circumcision and not anything else.
in retrospect I regret starting this hare
The impulse was a HN sub where the ~~CDC~~CPS was gonna mark infant male circumcision as bad
~~becase the CDC is now basically RFK JR/MAHA aligned, my thought went instantly to neo-nazis.~~ [See above, this was CPS, not CDC, so I doubly misread. Further association follows] In part because a couple of election cycles ago here in Sweden, the local nationalist party tried to resurrect the old Swedish ban on kashrut slaughter as an anti-islamist trope, showing that these bad Nazi ideas keep showing up
HN submission (flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567696
Previous discussion on HN from 9 years ago, no-one mentions Fremskrittspartiet are heirs to Nazis, nor that the linked submission explicitely calls out the legislation as anti-semitic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291906
I completely forgot that the US is almost unique in the prevalence of infant male circumcision on non-religious grounds
When I used to work at the farmers' market in San Francisco, I would always dread when somebody had a protest scheduled for the Embarcadero plaza, as it would make packing up and getting out at the end of the day even more of a chore. But the most, ah, visually striking of those was certainly the "intactivists." It was actually a fairly gender-diverse crowd, plenty of concerned moms mixed in (and I was given to suspect that some of them had to be drawn from what we would now call MAHA circles)... But the centerpiece was a bunch of guys holding signs and wearing bleached-white jeans with red circles painted on their groins 😬
Ah yes the first group I looked up, the “Bloodstained Men & Their Friends” (BSM) are the ones who started (perhaps appropriated from period havers) the red on white pants thing.
And now I’m imagining ordering a porchetta sandwich at Roli Roti, seeing them protest, and remembering to ask for extra pork skin.
j/k, I would never forget to order the crackling.
(I’m so sorry for that)
Don't forget to tip!