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whswhs May 8 2020, 14:11:42 UTC
I didn't know Tom Riddle had a blog . . .

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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starshipcat May 8 2020, 15:55:03 UTC
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).

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whswhs May 8 2020, 16:45:38 UTC
Ah, okay. I know of him.

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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starshipcat May 11 2020, 00:14:44 UTC
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.

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selenite May 8 2020, 18:15:26 UTC
Ah. Him. I was reading his blog for a bit after an earlier kerfuffle. Noticed a few contradictions in his advocacy:

- All nations should be monoethnic / praise Putin for reincorporating former Soviet areas into Russian control.

- Biblical creationist / human mating is driven by evolutionary psychology

. . . and some others I don't want to dig out of memory at the moment.

So I've written him off as a troll without a coherent philosophy. Perhaps that's unfair. "Write whatever outrages enough people to draw clicks" is coherent, though it's debatable whether it counts as a philosophy.

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starshipcat May 11 2020, 00:44:16 UTC
It's quite common, and it seems like the more extreme one's views, the less one recognizes the contradictions among them.

And as long as clickbait is rewarded with traffic, we'll see more and more of it.

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