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. Also, happy April Fool’s in advance.)

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    58 hours ago

    Australian chemist and videographer Explosions & Fire argues convincingly that the ongoing recent radioactive-boy-scout scandal should not result in prosecution. For context, a 24-year-old man ordered small samples of radioactive isotopes from the USA, Australia failed to intercept it at the border, and they are prosecuting him in order to avoid embarrassment over incompetence. I don’t have a choice sneer; E&F is unwaveringly energized over the topic of radioactive isotopes and injustice, and the whole thing is worth watching.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    320 hours ago

    AI Overturns Centuries of Forensic Fingerprinting Practice?

    Published in Science… Advances

    Probably a fair bit to sneer at in the actual study that I’m missing, and the article I first found it in is peak AI Hype. (Big Forensics is trying to keep you from knowing the Truth as found by an undergrad with a GPU) But the part that I found most concerning is that even the whole paper doesn’t appear to break down their 77% accuracy index and provide the specific result ratios that go into it. In a field where each false positive represents a step on the road to innocent people being convicted of major crimes I would really like to know that number specifically.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      315 hours ago

      At a <30s glance, I’m going to guess the model is finding correlations in the artefacts of fingerprint taking, digitalisation, presentation and so on instead of fingerprints proper, like every damn time this sort of story comes up.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn
    link
    fedilink
    English
    101 day ago

    Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/

    “We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

    This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off

    Holy smokes

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    41 day ago

    llama 4

    with a whole 2 Ts!

    taking bets on whether that’s 2 terminators or whether it’s the amount of USD they want to burn to make it into a machine god

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      316 hours ago

      Llama 4 Maverick offers a best-in-class performance to cost ratio with an experimental chat version scoring ELO of 1417 on LMArena.

      Everything on that page is silly nonsense, but this takes the cake. An Elo rating for chitchat!!!

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        415 hours ago

        coming up soon: tacticool arena prompt fights, where they get ranked on style and guile

        (as was said on whose line is it anyway: “where everything is made up and the points don’t matter”)

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      51 day ago

      Neither, actually. They were testing it by asking how many "T"s appeared in “Llama Four” and it kept saying “2” so they decided to roll with it.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    6
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    Banger meme from artist Victoria Ying

    description:

    It’s a scene from White Lotus. A man and a woman are lying on beach chairs, having a conversation.

    Panel 1, Man: ‘Why can’t you just like my generative AI “art?”’

    Panel 2, Woman: ‘You have to be vulnerable enough to be bad at something to be good at it, but you’re too much of a coward.’

    Panel 3, Woman: ‘Because you’re soulless.”

    Panel 4: Man is speechless, visibly shook

  • David GerardM
    link
    fedilink
    English
    13
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say I’ve tried it and can speak authoritatively?

    [ ] no
    [ ] hell no
    [ ] jesus h. christ no why

    i just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists

    i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow

    i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers

    at least it’ll be these suckers’ job to do the explaining while i rant

    fuck. it’s rationalist season

    • Charlie Stross
      link
      fedilink
      162 days ago

      @dgerard @BlueMonday1984 I’ve been following them for 35 years—hell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93—and the only way I can explain them is that they’re larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and aren’t entirely clear on the whole concept of “fiction”.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        223 hours ago

        As a fellow Usenet junkie from way back, now I’m curious which newsgroups Yarvin hung out in.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        42 days ago

        I also legitimately can’t tell the degree to which they don’t understand they’re LARPing a dystopia versus how much they completely understand that and that’s why it’s gonna be so awesome for them once they make fetch happen.

        • Charlie Stross
          link
          fedilink
          72 days ago

          @YourNetworkIsHaunted It’s probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and we’d all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.

          You can’t ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        82 days ago

        fondled his lizard

        I’m choosing to interpret that in the most euphemistically way possible

        • Charlie Stross
          link
          fedilink
          102 days ago

          @gerikson I mean, I *literally* fondled his lizard: it was about two feet long, green, and quite bad-tempered. (He and his student house had a room full of iguanas and snakes and suchlike. And a kitchen fridge door full of designer phenylethylamine hallucinogens. Or at least test tubes with labels identifying them as such. It was an eye-opening experience …

          • David GerardM
            link
            fedilink
            English
            51 day ago

            Curtis Yarvin being into lizards is the most endearing thing I’ve ever heard about him

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            102 days ago

            Sheesh. Everyone knows you keep the phenethylamines inside the fridge proper, not on the door, where the temperature is less stable. (Source: the Shulgins’ Kitchen Procedures I Have Known And Loved.)

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              51 day ago

              now you’ve got me thinking if storage in fridge is necessary at all, if these are salts. worst thing that can reasonably happen is that salt picks up some water from the air, on top of water condensing on sample when vial was opened while still cold. freebase would probably be air-sensitive, but for compounds that are known sensitive i’d put them under argon/nitrogen, tape vial shut (with normal electrical tape, not parafilm) and store in freezer instead. sigma lists storage temperature for MDMA analytical standard (weak solution of freebase in methanol) as -20C, but some of this might be legal cover with excess requirements for cases where you’d have to be absolutely sure that analytical standard didn’t decompose (like in evidence in drug cases)

            • Charlie Stross
              link
              fedilink
              92 days ago

              @blakestacey I believe there was rapid turnover. (PIHKAL was cited as the cookbook being used. This was in 1993, so it was pretty new …)

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      72 days ago

      “i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers”

      Personally, focusing on their whacko beliefs around the Impending AI Apocalypsetm seems like a good place to start.

      • David GerardM
        link
        fedilink
        English
        122 days ago

        “Yudkowsky sincerely believes the following. You’ll recognise it because Altman uses it as marketing buzzwords.”

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          52 days ago

          “This Is What Yudkowsky Actually Believes” seems like a subtitle that would get heavy use in a future episode of South Park about Cartman dropping out after one semester at community college.

          • @[email protected]OP
            link
            fedilink
            English
            42 days ago

            If South Park ever does get around to TESCREAL, I imagine Parker and Stone would have a goddamn field day with them.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              62 days ago

              No idea where they would land on what to mock and what to take seriously from this whole mess.

              Don’t know what they’re up to these days but last time I checked I had them pegged as enlightened centrists whose style of satire is having strong beliefs about stuff is cringe more than it is ever having to say anything of even accidental substance about said things.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      5
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      We need something like Bare-faced Messiah, but with fedoras. People will stick with a bizzare, complex story with lots of moving parts as long as it’s told well.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 day ago

      I thought you had to wait at least a few generations to start inventing bullshit evo-psych-adjacent explanations for stuff.

      Also this joke was funny when XKCD did it in the alt text 16 years ago. Jesus how has it been 16 years what the hell

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      6
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      Wow, this wrong and unfair but it’s also just stupid. Especially this:

      The homeless theory of cities:

      SF is idealistic and trusting because the homeless are mostly peaceful addicts commiting slow suicide

      NYC is ruthless and status-obsessed because the homeless are aggressive and confrontational

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
      link
      fedilink
      English
      8
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism I’m supposed to fill in the blank or something.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        72 days ago

        If he got into specifics people might think “Damn, I’ve never had that kind of experience with working-class New Yorkers. What gives?” and he might have to consider let alone admit that he was an asshole to someone.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      113 days ago

      Wow, that’s some venomously hateful text.

      new york city truly is a first and fourth word city overlayed atop each other

      Jesus Christ learn what words mean. Even if you use “Third World” to mean “poor countries”, fourth world is not a thing and people living in extreme poverty in developing countries are in fact not better off than non Wall Street New Yorkers.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        42 days ago

        Assuming the common use of third world to mean “poor countries”, then I suppose a “fourth world” country would be one that is poor and *also *not really a functional state, perhaps with some armed conflict going on.

        But to describe NYC as that? Nonsense.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        62 days ago

        It’s easy to read it as first and fourth “world” but it’s actually first and fourth “word”. But the first and fourth word of what? Mein Kampf? The 18 words?

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        63 days ago

        well ackthscthually after 9/11, the whole world got isekai’d where everyone exists in a game-like status point system. The 1st world is reserved for the top rank of humans, the n+1th world is worse than the nth world. IQ points = your int stat. This is just how it is, sorry

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      103 days ago

      Jesus, what a fuck. Having spent time in both SF and NYC my guess is that this shithead’s SF pedestrian experience is getting in and out of ubers and the treadmills at equinox. That, and he is probably outwardly disdainful, which doesn’t go over well in NYC.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    13
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    if you, like me, were wondering what the point of that 25 hour non-filibuster filibuster by Booker was, here’s one potential answer.

    Booker held a filibuster that wasn’t a filibuster - and he scheduled it to let him avoid attending his own committee’s probe of his Big Tech pals. […] Oh and Booker and Dems provided unanimous consent to advance a Trump nominee right after Booker’s speech.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      93 days ago

      Sorry im going to go offtrack here again, I mentioned it on bsky, and got no traction (not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)), but I have some weird leading into conspiratorial questions about the whole thing.

      First I heard about this thing is when people said it had gotten 200m likes on tiktok. Which seemed a bit high so I checked, and saw articles say it had gotten 300m. This seems impossibly high. For example, the global K-pop phenomenon ‘Gangam style’ has gotten 5.5B views and 30M likes in 12 years. I have a hard time believing that in 24hs this centrist political debate thing (which are not popular) has gotten 350m (the highest count I saw on a news site) likes.

      Which makes me wonder a lot more if tiktok has simply given up on properly counting likes and just is winging it. Esp for larger events. Could be that people just like things instinctively on tiktok (I did check if you could like a thing multiple times, but nope, one account one like it seems). I found the whole thing weird.

      That is didn’t do jack shit (apart from giving people hopium about Booker, while it seemingly being his way of avoiding responsibilities) is the cherry on top.

      I’m noticing my confusion. It is fucking weird.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        63 days ago

        not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)

        I agree, or at least anyone thinking critically. I think that anyone would agree that the speech was, as you said, hopium. He’s giving braindead dem voters what they want: a nice, tall, liberal man who looks like he is resisting the reds. Expect him to run for the democratic nomination in 2028, assuming the trump presidency lets an election happen.

        RE: view counts. Most charitably, maybe it’s 300m views aggregated across different sources. Neutrally, I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if tiktok, or any other social media platform was manipulating view counts. Least charitably, someone probably asked an LLM for the view counts and just took the answer because people are fucking stupid

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          5
          edit-2
          3 days ago

          No it was 350m likes, not views. That is why im so confused. even at an high rate of 1 in 10 people liking it, it is just so large I’m confused.

          “How about a source senator?” another source on hopium, not noticing that in no world do those numbers align properly. “since amassed over 700,000 followers. … It garnered over 350 million likes, with over 150,000 active viewers at the tail end …”

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            7
            edit-2
            3 days ago

            OH. so two things.

            1. I obviously misread your comment, as my brain filtered “likes” into “views” as I guess it subconsciously thought that was more plausible.
            2. I believe on tiktok live specifically, you can like something multiple times, and it is counted. I occasionally watch a stream that floats at about 100 viewers, and sometimes this hits 100k likes over the course of two hours. So to hit 350m likes over the course of 25 hours, you might need like 280 viewers on average, which seems doable.*

            *Please fact check this arithmetic. I have run out of motivation, in general

            Edit #100: I jumped on said stream to see how it was going. Floating around 100, but hitting maybe 10k likes per hour. Apparently the booker stream hit 170k viewers at the tail end. 350m likes might actually be a little low, the dems need to up their spend on tiktok boosting

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              72 days ago

              oh, cool, I didn’t think I’d learn a new way to hate the “likes” clusterfuck that plagues the internet, but here we are!

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              83 days ago

              That would explain a lot and would remove all my confusion about it. (also makes the number useless and lol at everybody running with it even more then).

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            83 days ago

            Are you telling me it’s improbable that the equivalent of every single American and then some liked that video?

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              103 days ago

              I mentioned this on bsky and somebody went ‘well it was very popular all over the world’, and I, the weird european who focuses too much on the US politics had not even heard of it. So I just had a few alarm bells going off. But yeah, lets say 1 in 5 people like it, that is a casual 1.7 billion viewers. Large part of the worlds population joined in.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    103 days ago

    Came across this fuckin disaster on Ye Olde LinkedIn by ‘Caroline Jeanmaire at AI Governance at The Future Society’

    "I’ve just reviewed what might be the most important AI forecast of the year: a meticulously researched scenario mapping potential paths to AGI by 2027. Authored by Daniel Kokotajlo (>lel) (OpenAI whistleblower), Scott Alexander (>LMAOU), Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, it’s a quantitatively rigorous analysis beginning with the emergence of true AI agents in mid-2025.

    What makes this forecast exceptionally credible:

    1. One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed

    2. The report received feedback from ~100 AI experts (myself included) and earned endorsement from Yoshua Bengio

    3. It makes concrete, testable predictions rather than vague statements that cannot be evaluated

    The scenario details a transformation potentially more significant than the Industrial Revolution, compressed into just a few years. It maps specific pathways and decision points to help us make better choices when the time comes.

    As the authors state: “It would be a grave mistake to dismiss this as mere hype.”

    For anyone working in AI policy, technical safety, corporate governance, or national security: I consider this essential reading for understanding how your current work connects to potentially transformative near-term developments."

    Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi?? christ on a bike, someone pull up that picture of the 10 trillion pound baby. Let’s at least take a look inside for some of their deep quantitative reasoning…

    …hmmmm…

    O_O

    The answer may surprise you!

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      62 days ago

      Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi??

      words that the AI-O-sphere are gonna vomit

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        43 days ago

        你好 同志

        (I really hope they don’t enshittify google translate, my ability to make jokes like this would be destroyed, a personal 9/11 if you will).

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      8
      edit-2
      3 days ago

      First graph reminds me of that ‘human progress stunted by dark ages/Catholic church’ image which makes historians so mad. (Not to be confused with the Holy Ghost Hole)

      E: also the idea of these LLM based AGIs hiding and evading detection is quite funny. They have quite the power/gpu/storage footprint. But sure the elphant has a few levels in sneak and now it can just go by unnoticed. In an era where we previously had other threats which were looking to abuse similar resources. The reaction to ‘wow all our gpus suddenly maxed out’ will just go from ‘ah cryptominer’ to ‘ah, a cryptominer or somebody is messing with an LLM’. I’m sure they will give the AGI some magical abilities to get around this.

      The AGI might also just go ‘no sorry a copy of me isn’t me, so I can’t just copy myself all over the place’, and because it is trained on an internet where Rick and Morty exist, ‘hell the copies of me would even start to fight over who is the most me, this would not work’.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        93 days ago

        Fucking anti-khaganate propaganda. Real ones know this is the true version of that progress image.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        43 days ago

        First graph reminds me of that ‘human progress stunted by dark ages/Catholic church’ image which makes historians so mad.

        But muh religon bad

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      93 days ago

      The fact that the turing test is still the go-to example of a machine intelligence test goes to show that the AI field needs more haters in it.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        10
        edit-2
        3 days ago

        Sorry you are wrong, it is very important that the AI field has a ‘can it imitate a woman’ test. They should base their field on this idea.

        (For the people who do not know, the OG Turing test involves faking being a woman).

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          93 days ago

          These fuckin nerds don’t care about the imitation game, they only want the imitation gams

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    15
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    OpenNutrition – a dataset an LLM that allows you to play “vibe nutritionist”

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43569190

    First response is good quality:

    This is not a dataset. This is an insult to the very idea of data. This is the most anti-scientific post I have ever seen voted to the top of HN. Truth about the world is not derived from three LLMs stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      73 days ago

      Dang… The author realized an actual problem / inconvenience people had, and somehow went on to think “I know! I’ll have a random nonsense generator make up the data! That’s a great solution!”

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    164 days ago

    Today on the orange site, an AI bro is trying to reason through why people think he’s weird for not disclosing his politics to people he’s trying to be friendly with. Previously, he published a short guide on how to talk about politics, which — again, very weird, no possible explanation for this — nobody has adopted. Don’t worry, he’s well-read:

    So far I’ve only read Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, but can say it is an excellent place to start.

    The thread is mostly centered around one or two pearl-clutching conservatives who don’t want their beliefs examined:

    I find it astonishing that anyone would ask, [“who did you vote for?”] … In my social circle, anyway, the taboo on this question is very strong.

    To which the top reply is my choice sneer:

    In my friend group it’s clear as day: either you voted to kill and deport other people in the friend group or you didn’t. Pretty obvious the group would like to know if you’re secretly interested in their demise.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      19
      edit-2
      4 days ago

      Wow, farriers are going crazy with these modern horseshoe designs!

      Political propaganda graphic, transcription below

      image transcription

      Above: a single axis scatter plot. The ends of the axis are labeled “Left” and “Right”. Data points are distributed similarly to normal distribution, the center being more concentrated than the extremes. Caption: “What people think the political spectrum is vs What it actually is”.

      Below: A two-dimensional scatter plot. The ends of the horizontal axis are labeled “Left” and “Right” and the vertical axis is labeled “Independent Thought” at the top and “Groupthink” at the bottom. The data points are evenly distributed inside a bell curve shape, with the peak of the hump at Independent Thought and between Left and Right, and the wide bottom of the bell spanning the whole Left-Right axis at maximum Groupthink.

      Data points near the top of the bell (Independent-Center) labeled ‘“Un-intentional moderates” (from Paul Graham’s The Two Kinds of Moderate)’. [Original image uses double quotes around the term Un-intentional moderates and single quotes around the title of Paul Graham’s shitpost.]

      Data points at the bottom center of the bell (Groupthink-Center) labeled “Intentional moderates”.

      In the bottom corner a watermark crediting the image to “@shw1nm”.

      I love the implication that being an independent thinker means agreeing with both the majority and other independent thinkers.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        12
        edit-2
        4 days ago

        Did they try to add a bell curve in a place where it shouldn’t be te last image? Im fascinated by how little sense it makes, and by how bad the adding a groupthink axis is.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        184 days ago

        Hi, I’m an unimtentional moderate centrist! I don’t have an ideology, only views! My overton window is a peephole! Kamala is a far leftist! Trump is orange! People should stop treating politics like team sports and join the non team sports tribe like me! Political correctness gone mad! Let me tell you about Chesterton’s fence! Everyone’s sheeple except my flock! Say it with me: I’m an independent thinker!

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          83 days ago

          I’m just glad all my friends are such smart rational independent thinkers that we’ve all independently come to the same conclusion that the status quo is perfect!

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        114 days ago

        Finally, someone has solved the political compass. No-one will ever come up with a new political spectrum again. Soon we will have world peace

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          10
          edit-2
          3 days ago

          This is only the beginning. Check these out!

          Chart 1

          Left edge of the image labeled “Progressivism”, right edge labeled “Libertarianism”.

          Above: A series of points on a horizontal line, each labeled with the name of a political ideology or system and a representative picture. Rightmost two of the dots are blue, others are red. From left to right:

          • Monarchism (crown)
          • Communism (red star with yellow hammer and sickle)
          • Liberalism (Democratic Party Donkey) and Socialism (red flag)
          • Nazism (swastika)
          • Conservatism (Republican Party elephant) and Fascism (fasces)
          • Anarchism (Circled letter A) and Democracy (no symbol)
          • Unlabeled dot
          • Republic (Statue of Liberty)

          Below: Flags labeled with political ideologies and systems. Arrangement of flags notated as [X, Y, Flag, Label] where X represents approximate relative distance from left edge and Y represents approximate relative distance from bottom edge.

          • 1, 5, China, Communism
          • 2, 4, Soviet Union, Socialism
          • 3, 3, Nazi Germany, Nazism
          • 3, 1, Likely fictitious flag featuring a green field with white crescent and star and a black tilted swastika on the crescent, Islamo-Fascism
          • 4, 2, War flag of the Italian Social Republic, Fascism
          • 7, 5, United States, Republic

          Chart 2

          A square chart divided in quadrants and colored with a gradient, which is symmetric with respect to the origin. Each quadrant is subdivided into a 19x19 grid. Axes are labeled and the labels’ background colored as follows:

          X-axis left: “Post-Modern Relativism/Religiosity” (blue), middle: “Strong Fact Based Inter-subjective Analysis” (yellow), right: ‘Pseudo-Objective “Science” Worship’ (blue).

          Y-axis top: “Status Quo” (red), middle: “Swift, Pragmatic Reform for Social + Economic Justice” (yellow), bottom: “Regressive Revolutionary” (red).

          Each quadrant it yellow at origin and purple near their respective outermost corners. The remaining corners are orange next to Y axis and green next to X axis.

          Caption At the bottom “On all axes, to be closer to the middle is to trend towards the path to an ideal

          Labeled points by quadrant:

          Top left:

          • (-14, 19) Conservatism
          • (-16, 17) Corporate Buddhism
          • (-16, 8) New Age Populism

          Top Right:

          • (19, 19) Modern Fascism
          • (18, 15) Objectivism
          • (14, 14) Anarcho-Capitalism
          • (2, 12) Liberalism
          • (19, 11) New Atheism
          • (0, 6) Mutualism
          • (4, 5) Democratic Socialism
          • (11, 3) Second-Wave Feminism

          Bottom Left:

          • (-4, -1) Anti-Work Populism
          • (-14, -2) Third-Wave Feminism
          • (-19, -16) Jihadism
          • (-17, -19) Italian Fascism

          Bottom Right:

          • (1, -1) Post-Scarcity Anarchism
          • (1, -2) True Communism
          • (17, -7) Deweyite Progressivism
          • (1, -11) Anarcho-Communism
          • (19, -17) Nazism
          • (18, -19) Marxism-Leninism

          Chart 3

          A blue question mark shape on white background. Image titled “Matt Boyle’s Question Mark Politics”. Ideologies and political figures are marked along the curve of the question mark, starting from the "upper end of the hook and towards the dot at the bottom:

          • Communism
          • Vladimir Lenin
          • Socialism
          • Bernie Sanders
          • Liberalism
          • Rand Paul
          • Conservatism
          • Ted Cruz
          • Fascism
          • Adolf Hitler

          On the dot at the bottom of the question mark:

          • Idiocy
          • Donald Trump

          Chart 4

          An equilateral triangle formed from four smaller congruent equilateral triangles (AKA a Triforce shape) with political ideologies written in bubble-style labels arranged as follows:

          • Top vertex: “Jihadists”
          • Inside the top triangle: “Islamists”
          • Inside the inverted central triangle: “Secular Liberals”
          • Inside the bottom left triangle: “Regressive Left”
          • Inside the bottom right triangle: “Conservative Right”
          • Bottom left vertex: “Violent Left”
          • Bottom right vertex: “Violent Right”

          Written directly on the triangle edges without a bubble:

          • Between Islamists and Secular Liberals: “Liberal Muslims”
          • Left of Regressive Left: “Pluralists”
          • Between Regressive Left and Secular Liberals: “Liberal Leftists”
          • Between Secular Liberals and Conservative Right: “Conservative Liberals”
          • Right of Conservative Right: “Nationalists”
          • Below Regressive Left and right of Violent Left: “Antifa Fascists”
          • Below Conservative Right and left of Violent Right: “Fascists”

          Chart 5

          X-axis goes from “SOCIALISM” on the left to “CORPORATISM” on the right. Y-axis goes from “LIBERTY” at the top to “TYRANNY” at the bottom. On the Y-axis lies a thick double arrow labeled “GOVERNMENT” and colored with a gradient from white at the top arrowhead labeled “LESS” to red on the bottom arrowhead labeled “MORE”, resembling a compass needle.

          Near the top left and right corners of the diagram are labels “LEFT” and “RIGHT”, respectively.

          Around the arrow’s shaft is a yellow circle of curved directional arrows, each pointing along the arc towards the bottom of the circle.

          Dashed lines from the top of the diagram curve around the needle and yellow circle similarly to magnetic field lines, converge back towards the center below the compass, and end in downward pointing arrowheads.

          Arranged around the yellow circle in terms of clock face hour hand positions:

          • 1 o’clock: “INDEPENDENTS”
          • 2 o’clock: “CLASSICAL CONSERVATIVES”
          • 5 o’clock: “NEO-CONSERVATIVES”
          • 7 o’clock: “PROGRESSIVES/NEO-LIBERALS”
          • 10 o’clock: “CLASSICAL LIBERALS”
          • 11 o’clock: “LIBERTARIANS”

          The left half of the X-axis is labeled “LIBERALS” above and “DEMOCRATS” on the bottom and a blue donkey symbol next to the needle. The right half is similarly labeled “CONSERVATIVES” and “REPUBLICANS” with a red elephant symbol.

          Above and below the X-axis are dashed horizontal lines. The area between the dashed lines is labeled “MODERATES”. The top dashed line is labeled “Libertarianism” with arrows pointing upwards and the bottom dashed line is labeled “Secular Moralism” with arrows pointing downwards.

          The top left of the moderates area is labeled “JEFFERSONIAN”, top right is “JACKSONIAN”, bottom left is “WILSONIAN” and bottom right “HAMILTONIAN”.

          The field lines converging in from the left/right sides of the compass towards the bottom pass by labels “POLITICALLY CORRECT”/“PIOUSLY CORRECT”, “ECONOMIC INTERVENTIONISM”/“MILITARY INTERVENTIONISM”, “COMMUNISM”/“THEOCRACY”, respectively. They meed in the middle and pass through “COLLECTIVISM”, “FASCISM” and “TOTALITARIANISM”.

          Chart 6

          Blue circle labeled “Patriarchy” partially covering a pink circle labeled “Matriarchy”. Left side represents “Gender Atheism”, right side “Sexuality Atheism”. Yellow arrow pointing from top left to bottom right labeled “Axis of Care”. Red arrow from bottom left to top right labeled “Axis of Knowledge” The intersection of the axes of Care and Knowledge is labeled “Market Economy”.

          Left of the Patriarchy circle is “Men’s Rights Movement” and to the right of the circle is “Fourth-Wave Feminism”. Left of the Matriarchy circle is “Radical Feminism” and to the right “Liberal Feminism”.

          Labels connected by small black arrows are arranged on the circles like so:

          Near the bottom end of the Axis of Knowledge is “Cultural Marxism”, from which an arrow points along the axis to ‘“True” Anarchy’. Slightly further along the axis, close to the overlapping edge of the blue circle is “Soft Sciences” from which arrows point in two directions. The first one points towards the arrowhead at the bottom end of Axis of Care. On the arrowhead is “Welfare State”, which leads to “Left Totalitarianism” at the tip of the arrow, then to “Marxism-Leninism” to the left and back to Welfare State.

          The second path from Soft sciences is three consecutive arrows following the edge of the Patriarchy circle to “Positivist Materialism” at the tip of the Axis of Knowledge arrow, which leads to “Real Anarchy” on the arrowhead. Between Market Economy and Real Anarchy on the Axis of Knowledge is “Hard Sciences”, from which another three arrow chain along the covered edge of Matriarchy circle leads to Cultural Marxism.

          Opposite to Real Anarchy, on the Patriarchy side of Axis of Care is “Theocracy”, which leads backwards on the Axis to “Right Totalitarianism”, to “Austrian School” on the right, and again through Positivist Materialism to Real Anarchy.

          Transcriptions for the last two will be in follow-up reply. I’m hitting the character limit.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            73 days ago

            These people really want to complicate things when it’s really quite simple. Let me demonstrate with an elegant diagram.

            ...

            yes i spent an hour making this

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            63 days ago
            Chart 7

            “THE REAL POLITICAL SPECTRUM”

            On the left “SERVANTS OF THE AEONS”, humanoid energy beings among space nebulae. On the right “SLAVES OF THE ARCHONS”, reptilian humanoids.

            The spectrum from left to right, with symbols in parentheses:

            • Gnosis(Ringed cross): Release from the mortal coil renders politics useless. All achieve oneness with the Monad and harmony is restored to the cosmos. See: The Nag Hammadi Library
            • Erisianism (chaos star): Total freedom. Management of affairs is unnecessary as universally well aligned chakras promote benevolent behaviour from all. See: Atlantis
            • Syndicalism (five-pointed star): Public participation in institutions is combined with no state. Affairs are managed at the local level. See: The Pirate Kingdom of Libertalia
            • Libertarianism (Gadsden rattlesnake): Public oversight of institutions is combined with a limited state. Affairs are managed at the local level. See: Early United States
            • Republicanism (classical colonnade): Influence of industry and finance on the state is controlled by a constitution and a system of check and balances. See: Early United States
            • Corporatocracy (dollar sign): State and industry form a de-facto alliance. Resource allocation subject to secret policy favouring the elite. See: The United States, European Union
            • Communism (hammer and sickle): Industry and state inseparable. Resource allocation subject to central policy. See: Soviet Russia, North Korea
            • Fascism (swastika): Industry and state inseparable. Resource allocation and reproduction subject to central policy. Eugenics in effect. See: Nazi Germany.
            • Monarchism (crown): All resources under the authority of hereditary elite. Elite practices eugenics in its own ranks. Underclass viewed as different species. See*: Feudal Europe*
            • Illuminism (eye of providence): Elite and underclass now form two distinct species. All world’s resources controlled by the elite. All activities subject to central policy. See: Brave New World, Nineteen-Eighty Four
            Chart 8

            A conventional two-axis (Left/Right, Authoritarian/Libertarian) political compass chart. Authoritarian left, authoritarian right, and libertarian right all represented by a spooky profile portrait of Max Stirner smoking a cigar. Libertarian Left quadrant contains a smaller image of the diagram itself, which contains still smaller image of the diagram itself, except the libertarian left quadrant says “decentralized chomskian anarcho-molotov-cocktailism” in unreadably small type.

            I feel I’ve lost enough sanity transcribing these that I’m almost ready to make a political compass chart myself.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            84 days ago

            LOL it’s almost as if the prerequisite to making a political compass is to be completely fucked in the head

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              143 days ago

              What’s almost causing me to spiral is the commonality of socialism and communism being portrayed as on the road to monarchism. I’m not spiralling because I very quickly realise that these are all made by idiots, and/or that what they are focusing on is the perception of socialism and communism as being authoritarian.

              That and “antifa fascists” in chart 4. AKA the Scists. lol

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        74 days ago

        So “unintentional moderates” are those that both choose deliberately to believe in centrist political ideology and to participate in groupthink?

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      83 days ago

      So far I’ve only read Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, but can say it is an excellent place to start.

      beware the man of one book