Seriously, I don't know who it is you're hinting about. Not having either a true name or a link means I don't have the ability to monitor what they're saying, as you seem to wish. And not belng able to read the blog for myself, I'm not in a position to assess the reliability of your comments about the blogger.
It's (Theodore) (Beale), otherwise known as (Vox) (Day). He's notorious for sending his minions to troll anyone who criticize him on their blogs, and making inappropriate comments in his blog about women who criticize him on their blogs. After one such incident, Sarah Hoyt started calling him The Man With the Unfortunate Screen Name because his screen name in comments is VD, which is also an old term for what is now called an STI. Given how easy it is to provide fake or disposable email addresses for combox posts, using a handle is easier than playing whack-a-mole blocking him and his Dread Ilk (some of whom may well be bots rather than bios).
I first learned of him a few years ago. At the time he was being criticized or condemned for, among other things, arguing for throwing acid in girls' faces. I wanted to see what he was about for myself, and as it happened, the first post I came upon was about throwing acid in girls' faces. He was arguing that this could be justified, with perfect logic, on the utilitarian ground of "the greatest good of the greatest number" or "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." This was a classic reductio ad absurdum intended as an attack on utilitarian ethics, which he rejected. But by dint of selective quotation and failure to read the original source, it was widely reported as his being in favor of a practice he offered as a horrible example of where other people's views could lead
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I remember that one, and I'm willing to allow that it could be a case of Poe's Law. However, there have been enough cases where someone presented an extreme view and when they got some pushback, claimed it was supposed to be satirical, or sarcastic, or otherwise not to be taken literally, in a way that came across very much as someone who realized they'd gone over the line, but didn't want to humble themselves and apologize, so they claimed misunderstood intent.
I certainly grant that that happens. But I didn't read anything he wrote in response to the controversy over it, if indeed he wrote anything; I just read the original piece. I was the one who judged that it was explicitly stated as something he opposed, and not as something he favored.
With that link, I have now read the five-part essay by van Creveld that I believe you are referring to. I think you have misrepresented him. He does offer the Republic of Gliead as an (exaggerated) fictional model for a counter-feminist revolution; but he also says that he's glad he won't live to see such a thing, but fears his children and grandchildren will, and he goes on to describe its horrific consequences. Neither his introduction nor his conclusion reads, to my eye at least, as advocacy. That at least makes him a good counterpart to (Beale): he presents the kind of argument that can be misread in certain ways.
I wrote my post before his fifth and final part was posted, in which he made it clear that he regarded it as a Bad Thing, not something to be desired. The tenor of the middle parts were just enough like a document I read back in the 1990's by someone who actually did advocate stripping women of their civil rights (among other "reforms") that I found it intensely alarming.
But that may well be a problem inherent in the written word. After all, did not William Blake say that Milton was of the Devil's party and did not know it? And how many times has S.M. Stirling had to tell people that the Draka are a dystopia? A sufficiently vivid portrayal of a horror can be perceived by some readers as something desirable, even when the writer has no such intent.
Seriously, I don't know who it is you're hinting about. Not having either a true name or a link means I don't have the ability to monitor what they're saying, as you seem to wish. And not belng able to read the blog for myself, I'm not in a position to assess the reliability of your comments about the blogger.
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I first learned of him a few years ago. At the time he was being criticized or condemned for, among other things, arguing for throwing acid in girls' faces. I wanted to see what he was about for myself, and as it happened, the first post I came upon was about throwing acid in girls' faces. He was arguing that this could be justified, with perfect logic, on the utilitarian ground of "the greatest good of the greatest number" or "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." This was a classic reductio ad absurdum intended as an attack on utilitarian ethics, which he rejected. But by dint of selective quotation and failure to read the original source, it was widely reported as his being in favor of a practice he offered as a horrible example of where other people's views could lead ( ... )
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It's a shame that it's become so difficult to distinguish genuine endorsement from satire or reductio ad absurdem.
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But that may well be a problem inherent in the written word. After all, did not William Blake say that Milton was of the Devil's party and did not know it? And how many times has S.M. Stirling had to tell people that the Draka are a dystopia? A sufficiently vivid portrayal of a horror can be perceived by some readers as something desirable, even when the writer has no such intent.
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