Someone posted this on ssc with a warning about talking to cops, but really just marvel at what’s going on here.
Aaronson manages to turn a story where he is briefly arrested for a theft (which he did commit on video!) into paragraphs and paragraphs of indulging in his persecution fantasies.
Zero empathy on display for the people he stole from, the people just doing their jobs, or reflection on the fact that it wasn’t a simple little mistake anyone could make but rather… a fairly weird move? Do people usually put change in cups?
god damn, the only part of this post I’m sure happened as written is that this asshole absolutely stole $4 in change on purpose just to see what would happen
But I try to remind myself every day that the human race doesn’t consist solely of Arthur Chus (or Amanda Marcottes, or Lubos Motls, or SneerClub posters, or Paul Manaforts or Donald Trumps). The world contains millions of women and men of every background and ideology who want actual dialogue, many of whom I’m lucky to count as friends, many of whom I met through this blog. Vulnerability is possible because the world is not uniformly evil.
—but regardless, it’s absolutely somehow our fault. drink!
also I found the actual reason why all of this happened, but Scott buried it in a giant block of text so I’m gonna have to reconstruct a little bullet point timeline:
- when we did arrive, (barely) on time, the contemptuous American Airlines counter staff deliberately refused to check us in, chatting as we stewed impotently, so that we’d no longer be on time and they could legally give our seats away to others, and strand us in an airport with two young kids.
- the only replacement flight was in a different terminal. * in the stress of switching terminals–everything is stressful with two kids in an airport–I lost our suitcase.
- the only shuttle to get back to the terminal went around the long way, and was slow as molasses, and by the time I returned our suitcase had been taken by the bomb squad
so this absolute dipshit started a fight with an airline employee over a flight he was too late to catch (for utterly dipshitted reasons I’ve omitted, see the original post), somehow lost a suitcase, left it unattended for so long that the fucking bomb squad had to be called (which involves automatic confiscation of the suitcase, shutting down the terminal it was left in, and usually detention and a stiff fine for the owner of the luggage — this is usually a big enough problem that it makes the local news), then was caught stealing from a shop after a long day of being belligerent and breaking TSA policy. how is our sweet child not in prison?
SneerClub posters
Senpai has noticed us!!!
He is obsessed with SneerClub, I found out about here because of him lol
He does seem like a sensitive type, and managed to get on the wrong side of some internet drama years ago (I think he derailed a discussion about sexual harassment with whining about how women didn’t want to sleep with him?) and he doesn’t seem to be thick-skinned enough to just ignore the haters.
Thanks for the link.
JFC, considering the amount of hate Penny and Marcotte have to contend with daily makes Scott having one unpleasant run-in with police then whining about it even more pathetic.
That’s the Amanda Marcotte incident. Here’s an article about the incident (from the Atlantic’s regular series, “annals of the nerd blogs we feel the need to share with the nation”). The article is very sympathetic to Scott A but some of it just cannot be made to sound sympathetic. He unironically believes (believed?) that nerd men are “some of society’s least privileged males”. He also refers to all non-nerd men as neanderthals…
addendum: the cops and TSA involved in the above are also absolute dipshits, I’m just shocked that they managed to be out-dipshitted by a single Scott Aaronson
I also feel bad for the airline employee, who was more than likely just doing their best
we did arrive, (barely) on time, the contemptuous American Airlines counter staff deliberately refused to check us in, chatting as we stewed impotently
Major ‘I’d like to speak to your manager’ vibes.
No empathy for the employees, their little mistakes are assumed to be deliberate, but when the same is assumed of him, the big burley men are here to take the nerds away, I knew it.
But kids are hard!
how is our sweet child not in prison?
Maybe he’s not as persecuted as he thinks? Waving cash around helps apparently.
Lubos Motl
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
it’s only a matter of time until big, scary armed guys come for me, as they came for so many other nerdy misfits.
Citation most definitely needed.
Likewise, Arthur Chu recently tweeted that he’s “unhappy about [my] continued existence”–i.e., on a straightforward reading, that he wants me to die.
The tweet was a reply to Aaronson saying (in part),
Far be it from me to psychoanalyze him, as he constantly does to me, but Chu’s unremitting viciousness doesn’t strike me as coming from a place of any great happiness with his life. So I say: may even Mr. Chu find whatever he’s looking for.
To which Chu replied,
I am unhappy about many things, including the continued existence, wealth and social status afforded to men like you, and the cheesy sentimentality is not reciprocated
I.e., on a straightforward reading, he was talking about “existence” in the sense of lifestyle, not life. (The OED gives “sheltered existence” as an example of this meaning, which I find apt.)
owing to a chain of mishaps that I’d (probably melodramatically) been describing to Dana as insane beyond the collective imagination of Homer and Shakespeare and Tolstoy and the world’s other literary giants to invent.
🚩
And I wanted to say to Dana: you see?? see what I’ve been telling you all these years, about the nature of the universe we were born into?
🚩 🚩
If anything, this is an example of a situation in which talking to the cops is actually your best option. If he’d sullenly plead the 5th there’s a good chance they’d have arrested him properly and maybe even charged him, causing him to miss his flight.
I can admit this sounds like a fairly unpleasant experience, but airports are high security, unpleasant environments. I’m still not sure how someone could accidentally take a tip jar despite paying with card. Did he black out for 30 seconds?
“It’s like: my accusers arrive on the scene committed to a specific, hostile theory of me: that I’m a petty thief of smoothie bars, let’s say, or a sexual-harassment-loving misogynist.”
But he did take the smoothie bar money. He might not have realized he was doing it, he might not have done it on purpose, but he did take the money. In this metaphor, he commits sexual harrassment but it’s ok because he’s too gormless to realize what he’s doing.
Oh, and note that this time they “Came After Scott Aaronson” (waves hands around all spooky like) SVSS didn’t write another ‘Untitled’ screed, but against cops instead of feminists. Just saying.
Post is from 2018…
Here’s the HN discussion (he’s a bit of a hero there)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717816
Lots of people lawyering that taking from a tip jar isn’t stealing as the money technically does not belong to anyone lol.
There’s some actual gold in there
If Aaronson was capable of respectful communication then when the smoothie person got angry at him he would have considered the possibility that the anger was warranted and he had done something wrong. And probably would have pretty quickly realized: “oh wait I’m putting down money on this tray that I just picked up money from… that doesn’t make any sense.” But instead he immediately jumped to: “there’s something wrong with this smoothie shop worker” Everyone would have been saved a ton of grief if Aaronson had any respect for the people around him or any self awareness. But he has neither.
a person who repeatedly fails to execute fairly simple tasks in an airport that is specifically designed to make everything as strait [sic] forward as possible is otherwise a very successful human.
Another good comment:
sounds like the officers didn’t know that the amount taken was so small. From the post:
After many more attempts to intimidate me, I was finally informed of the charge: “that smoothie place over there says you the stole cash from their tip jar.” Huh? How much? One of the officers returned from the smoothie bar, and said, a bit sheepishly: “they say it was $4.”
So the most likely scenario was a comedy of errors. All the cops know is that the manager of the smoothie place ran up to them and said “that guy just robbed our tip jar!” They interpret this to mean he emptied out the entire tip jar, which would be a pretty brazen thing to do, so they roll up on him hard out of disgust that anyone would do such a thing. Then they talk to him and discover that what actually happened is that he absent-mindedly took $4. That’s a very different class of violation, but it’s not like they can take back the aggressiveness of their initial approach. The damage was done.
In theory, the officers could have avoided the mistake by questioning the manager for more details before making the stop. Look at it from their perspective, though – one of the people you’re employed to protect is telling you that he’s just been robbed, and if you futz around too long, the perpetrator gets on his plane and gets away with it. It’s not surprising they would decide to stop the guy first and work out the details once they could be confident he wasn’t going anywhere.
But no, it’s just that the world is against Scott. It’s not just feminist bloggers from the early 2010s, it’s the cops, it’s everyone.
Honestly I can’t help but interpret this as “if Scott was neurotypical then none of this would have happened to him, so it’s all his fault.”
asshole personality disorder is not in fact a neurodivergence
Holy shit the nerd persecution complex on display here.
“Your answers are rambling and all over the place. Stop making up stories. We know you did it.”
Well, this is accurate, but not about how cops speak ime
The rest of that…good lord, it’s like babby’s first run-in with this kinda crap. Not sure they’ll realize the critics have a point, tho
My experiences with cops have ranged from the comically absurd to the “I just have to close my eyes and I can still taste the pepper spray”, so hey, I’m plenty prepared to be sympathetic with Scott Aa here. But boy did he ever step on that hard.
