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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

  • @[email protected]English
    4•6 hours ago

    Isn’t Julia a member of some sort of anti-sex league, meaning there’s a lot of bad faith involved in their relationship from the get go?

    Also with respect to the attitudes on women and proles, although I don’t think it’s entirely written in the character’s point of view it feels like there’s a lot of unreliable narration going on, or at least you get a lot of stuff from the perspective of a person who grew up in one of the most absurdly totalitarian regimes in literature. Which is to say, it didn’t feel prescriptive most of the time to me.

    See also: “proles”, as in the contempt is baked in to the language, which we know the regime is actively trying to hold in a tight leash.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•4 hours ago

      I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only viewpoint you get is that of a middle class bureaucrat. It’s the assumed audience, and it’s where Orwell would place himself as well. The narrative loses a lot of impact if you align yourself with the proles. Winston could live a real life if he really wanted to. I don’t think this point is intended by the novel.

      Isn’t Julia a member of some sort of anti-sex league, meaning there’s a lot of bad faith involved in their relationship from the get go?

      That’s a problem in itself, don’t you think? It’s all very “Feminists hate sex and they want to erase the differences between the genders”. Julia gets a taste of freedom and her right place in the world by putting on makeup and girly clothes and having a lot of sex.

      Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skillfully done, but Winston’s standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of color in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above, all, far more feminine.

      Also she’s a flighty moron.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•6 hours ago

      I have not read it in ages, but did hear somebody has written something (not sure if book or play or etc) of the book from Julias perspective.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•5 hours ago

        To be clear, I mean to say that in society where it’s life or death to be highly guarded and suspicious of everyone any romantic relationship is necessarily poisoned.

        Plus I think there’s a whole thing in the book about things being so restricted that fucking for fun is in itself an act of rebellion and thus another thing your partner has over you if they happen to need to give something up to the authorities.