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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I have no interest in Hacker News, so I tried back-tracking the person who put up the comment about Scott. He/they/whatever linked to this ArsonAtDennys twitter account, who is a "he/they" and who tweeted the Topher Brennan/Christopher Hallquist "I'm green with envy of Scott getting a NYT article all about him when my own attempt at a political career died in obscurity, so I'm going to leak an email exchange we had years back which he asked me to keep private, in order to make him look bad and make me feel better" spite dumping.

Our pal with the Topher retweets is on a Mastdon instance called koletiva.social which describes itself as:

Kolektiva is an anti-colonial anarchist collective that offers federated social media to anarchist collectives and individuals in the fediverse. For the social movements and liberation!

So I think we can guess where they are coming from, the other he/they are coming from, and where jasonhansel on HN is coming from. In sum, woker than thou, purity death spiral out the wazoo, and dying with jealousy and envy of any crab they imagine is climbing out of the bucket. "Look at me! Pay attention to me! I'm going to say this famous successful guy is Bad and so by extension that means I am Good and you should look at me! pay attention to me!"

the Topher Brennan/Christopher Hallquist "I'm green with envy of Scott getting a NYT article all about him when my own attempt at a political career died in obscurity..."

Tbf, Topher's been rather strongly opposed to Scott Alexander for more than seven years, ie before the SSC-sphere took off, so I don't think you need to make this sort of motivation for him.

It was rather coincidental, though, that he dumped those emails just after the big blow-up with the NYT, don't you think?

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