this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Scott Aaronson: "Open Letter to Anti-Zionists on Twitter"
Posting here rather than in a separate thread because I'm probably the only one who rememembers him from the old /r/sneerclub days, but he's an endlessly fascinating figure to me - his ability to view literally every possible scenario through the lens of "poor innocent little smol-bean Scott just wants to discuss things rationally, but is persecuted by his ontologically evil foes and their self-righteous dupes" - doesn't matter if it's feminists objecting to his older incel-y posts, Sneer Club dunking on him, cops arresting him for stealing from an airport store or leftists not being fans of the genocide he supports... He must always be the victim. His enemies must always be unreasonable and motivated by hatred of him, specifically.
looks like he did a shit job in this area https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
What's he referring to when he says he's most famous for something about confronting radical feminists with his personal issues?
my god, you missed out on that?
here is way too much background reading!
Don't forget how Arthur Chu wrote a response grounded in empathy, and Aaronson decided that Chu wants him dead. Really.
just looked the guy up. He's handsome. He literally looks like Jerry Seinfeld (actually, he looks even more like Pablo Schreiber who played Nicky Sobotka in The Wire). What a god damned twat. (Not that being attractive makes any of his arguments any worse than they already are)
He managed to attract and keep a wife and have kids with her and still talks like the most rancid incel.
The title of the blog ("Shtetl-Optimized") refers to his belief that he would have been happier in a traditional shtetl where the kindly village elders would assign a wife for him.
Yeah that always gets me, and he picked that name fully knowing what it meant. It isn't like the meaning of it has changed over time. (Like my now unfortunate nickname, which prob gets me tagged nowadays as a rightwinger, due to the weird shit they had with budweiser, and before that it got me tagged at a rabid leftwinger because of 'soy'. Nevermind that it predates all that, and even the bodybuilders/weightlifters misreading the science and causing the whole anti-soy mania, and it is just a reference to 90's shadowrun. I feel this a lot and then I ignore it because I figure most people are not this online to even notice).
Not just that, but one of very few feminist commenters in an aggressively anti-feminist comments section on a blogpost about how it's wrong that MIT pulled Walter Lewin's online lecture videos after he was accused of sexually harrassing a student. Scott Aaronson, Friend To All Women, felt no need to intervene as his fans trashed the very notion of online sexual harrassment - only when a woman made an uncharitable remark about nerd men.
Holy shit you just sent me down a rabbit hole. How can these people be so terrible. Existing in their spaces must be like constantly smelling faintly a rotting corpse but not being able to quite place where it's coming from.