Setting firm boundaries is for amateurs, haven’t you heard?

From another perspective, royalty gossip is the progenitor, and now the semi-vestigial rump, of the modern celebrity gossip industry

I think their brains have just been thoroughly microwaved by social media feedback loops. I remarked elsewhere that I’m not sure these people are or can be earnest about this (cf. the fact that the billionaires they’re celebrating are laser-focused on the tech they claim might doom the world); they’re simply too conditioned towards creating outrage content for Twitter. To me, this is more akin to LARPing “Leave Britney alone!” than it is serious political activism.

Huh. Are the remaining “classical liberals” in the wild just naturally covered in this much slime, or is it something Yud applied to himself specifically for this conversation?

it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation,

Now wait just a goddamn minute, I thought the whole schtick here was that our gracious correspondent is better than anyone else at evaluating situations that are relatively rare but nonetheless highly consequential

I would say that the in-group jargon is more of a retention tactic than an attraction tactic, although it can become that for people who are desperately looking for an ordered view of the world. Certainly I’ve seen it a lot in recovering Scientologists, expressing how that edifice of jargon, colloquialisms, and redefined words shaped their worldview and how they related to other people. In this case here, if you’ve been nodding along for a while and want to continue to be one of the cool guys, how could you not glomarize? Peek coolly out from beneath your fedora and neither confirm nor deny?

I will agree that the ratsphere has softer boundaries and is not particularly competently managed as a cult. As you allude to, too, there isn’t a clear induction ritual or psychological turning point, just a mass of material that you’re supposed to absorb and internalize over a necessarily lengthy stretch of time. Hence the most clearly identifiable cults are splinter groups.

I understand where he probably got the neologism “glomarize” from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer) but his willingness to beat you in the face with it until you accept it is a big part of what makes his writing style so offputting. And, uh, this level of enthusiasm for specialized jargon continues to fail to overcome the cult allegations.