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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst.

That reminds me, whatever happened to ClarkHat? I remember Popehat eventually had to break up with him publicly on his blog. Presumably because Popehat was getting respectable mainstream attention and no longer needed the cover of "Look, I can cohort with diverse views I disagree with!"

Then Clarkhat got banned from Twitter for reasons I don't even remember. Looks like he quit posting on Status 451 in 2016. I was slightly hopeful he'd have gotten his twitter back in that amnesty Musk declared, but alas, still suspended. Not that I think he'd come back. I'm more just curious what exactly it was he was writing back then that was so completely bonkers his colleagues broke up with him and he got banned.

There was also the small matter of the Vox Day affair. As you may recall, Ken White was one of VD's bĂȘte noires, while Clark was a friend of both of them. The way I remember it, some of Ken's followers started calling Clark out on his association with VD, and Clark defended VD as an honorable and unfairly villified man, while also insisting that he and Ken were bffs and if VD ever dared to go low (such as mocking Ken's mental illness) in his spats with Ken, Clark would "rain hellfire" on VD.

VD promptly went low and wrote a series of vitriolic, mocking posts poking at every one of White's exposed weaknesses. (Ken had, probably unwisely when in the middle of a public fight with one of the most proudly cruel, no-holds-barred partisans on the Internet, written openly about his depression and mental illness.) VD even took shots at Ken's adopted Korean-born child.

Response from Clark: crickets.

That's about the time when you stopped seeing him around. To all appearances, when called upon to back up his claims of loyalty, he quietly picked up his hat and slipped out of the room.

That's about the time when you stopped seeing him around. To all appearances, when called upon to back up his claims of loyalty, he quietly picked up his hat and slipped out of the room.

I don't get it.

I respect Vox Day, he's intelligent, a solid writer and a good editor.

He can also be charitably described as an egomaniacal crank who's overly credulous and always sure of himself.

I also prefer not having him around, certainly online. (he's probably one of those guys who's raving lunatic online and a mostly normal bloke offline)

Denouncing him should be a rather easy moral choice.

Denouncing him should be a rather easy moral choice.

Bluntly, I think Clark was a coward who was hoping his buddy Vox wouldn't call his bluff. That he thought Vox wouldn't indicates he also wasn't very smart.

Certainly, if he had "rained hellfire" on Vox for attacking Ken White, Vox would have turned his saber wit on Clark as well (as he's done on many other former allies), and Clark didn't fancy being at the receiving end of Vox's vitriol and his followers' scorn himself.

An interpretation that's likely to be true.

The one that got him booted from Popehat was his weird scifi “Hitlerite” allegory about Muslim immigrants to Europe that hasn’t been scrubbed. Weirdly the silence caused by his ban on Twitter seems better for his brand than whatever broke in Kens brain with Trump and his Twitter posting. Even back before the boot Clark’s long form writing wasn’t very interesting to me but his Twitter was amusing at least.

He wrote that immigration parable about Nazi aliens seeking asylum on Earth that led to a lot of handwringing in the comments and was apparently too much for Ken White.

I'd like to know if he's still around, too. He was pretty entertaining.

I kind of like it; it's fairly plausible.

Also, damn, I'm pretty sure I've seen a similar parable that ended up with the guy advocating in for letting in Hitlerite refugees getting kicked to death by some. (I believe Alexander Kruel wrote that one)

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