It’s rather funny reading the midwits at Popehat attempting to describe me for the benefit of each other. Even Clark himself doesn’t grasp what all of the Ilk have with ease:
Clark, I appreciate your description of Vox as a performance artist; it gives me a bit better perspective on his schtick. Given the “anti” in many of his expressed views, I can see what attraction he has for you. Yes, he’s brilliant; he has constructed an immense Vox-world, with its own social rules, heirarchy and mythos. He’s positioned himself in a pseudo-intellectual gaping hole and become the god of the whiny, sniveling mysogynistic mouth-breathers that inhabit its nether-regions. He is so over-the-top that it must take an enormous, expansive intellect to keep all that crazy consistent in some sort of weird Vox-world logical way. He’s also one of the nastiest narcissitic psychopaths to inhabit the planet Earth. The evil demons seem to dance at his command, as he draws the most vile thoughts out of his subjects to pour forth onto the internet – and he does it all with flair, making it seem effortless. Reading his posts and the comments is like looking beneath a rock and being blinded by the awful blackness of the anti-Christ. Some people say he’s insecure, but I think he’s doing pretty well at holding on to his Vox-world god-throne. I suspect much planning and deliberation go into his performance, because being Vox must be exhausting. I don’t know how he sleeps at night.
Count the obvious flaws:
- I’m not a performance artist. What you see is pretty much who and what I am. It’s an incomplete picture, of necessity, but what is visible is accurate enough. There is a reason you never see any contradicting exposes by people who know me; I don’t contradict myself.
- The readers here are not “whiny, sniveling mysogynistic mouth-breathers” and I am no one’s god.
- Occam’s Razor suggests that I am able to maintain consistency because I hew closely to truth and logic. Vox’s 1st Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.
- I’m neither nasty nor psychopathic. I am, admittedly, narcissistic and Machiavellian. I’m also highly empathetic. The psychologist commented that my profile was unusual in that I’m equally comfortable with direct or indirect conflict.
- It’s not exhausting being me at all. For better or for worse, I know who I am. When I sleep, I sleep soundly.
She certainly does better than Gunnar:
My attack on Vox Day’s anti-scientific nonsense is from the perspective of a biologist btw. I’ve seen a lot of anti-scientific nonsense over the years and I’m somewhat familiar with Vox Day’s creationist arguments, and I have dismissed them as completely nonsensical and generally awful. Now this Clark dude is telling me that I’m either being dishonest or illogical because I think Vox Day is peddling anti-scientific nonsense and I dismiss the idea of him as a serious thinker. Clark probably doesn’t even realize that by his argument he’s dismissing most of the biologists (and probably most scientists) on this planet as either being dishonest or illogical, but that is what he’s doing by claiming those are the two options if you think Vox Day is bad at logic.
This is amusing. What Gunnar doesn’t understand is that I am considerably more intelligent than most of the biologists and most of the scientists on the planet. One of the things we discussed in the May Brainstorm was directly related to this: the importance of NOT blithely trusting the experts for the highly intelligent. TL;DR: if you have a 135+ IQ and an expert is pinging your sense of wrongness, trust your instincts, put on the brakes, and dig into what he’s advising before proceeding no matter what the subject. Most of the time that happens, the expert is either unaware of better options, has got something wrong, or is misapplying a standard protocol. My philosophy with experts is this: respect, but verify.
And I always enjoy this idiotic midwit heuristic:
Christ what an insecure little shit. One of the things I’ve learned in life is that those who pound their chest and boast about what a badass they are and the havoc they’ll dispense if you cross them, aren’t and effectively can’t. They’re laughable. I have no idea what personal demon haunts him, but he’s definitely overcompensating for some perceived inadequacy. What a silly little shit.
Meanwhile, half the media organizations from the UK to New Zealand are writing furious stories about the ongoing havoc in the science fiction field. And all that havoc was triggered by a single blog post. Imagine what could happen if I actually put any thought or effort into it.
And all these Popehat dramatics stem from one tweet and one post that revealed nothing new about anyone. It’s nothing more than rabbits hopping about in alarm and attempting to DISQUALIFY for fear that members of their warren will defect and join the big bad wolf pack.