-It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
+[^event-horizon]: Event Horizon was the name of a group house in Berkeley.
+
+I will say that it finalized my sense that the vision of rationalism he had preached in the Sequences was dead as a cultural force. I was somewhat depressed for months afterwards.
+
+It wouldn't be so bad if Yudkowsky weren't trying to sell himself as a _de facto_ religious leader,[^religious-leader] profiting from the conflation of _rationalist_ in the sense of "one who aspires to systematically correct reasoning" and _rationalist_ as member of his fan-club/personality-cult.
+
+[^religious-leader]: "Religious leader" continues to seem like an apt sociological description, even if [no supernatural claims are being made](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural).
+
+But he does seem to actively encourage this conflation. Contrast the [Litany Against Gurus](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus) from the Sequences, to the way he sneers at "post-rationalists"—or even "Earthlings" in general (in contrast to his fictional world of dath ilan). The framing is optimized to delegitimize dissent. [Motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/): someone who's critical of central "rationalists" like Yudkowsky or Alexander; bailey: someone who's moved beyond reason itself.