Having woken up to reality itself, as [Richard] sees it, he starts a website or two, and after more than a decade, he has gathered a very small nucleus of people who also find meaning in the particular theory and practice which he espouses.

Two things:

• The reality that you speak of is referred to as actuality (the sensory experience, minus the affect) in the AF lingo; where the word 'reality' is used to refer to the affective inner reality (the emotive cloud surrounding the actual sensations).

• The 'meaning' that you speak is found only in a PCE or other lesser forms of experiences (feeling good/carefree/etc). There is no meaning in "theory" (AF is not a theory; it is a repeatable/verifyable condition). And the only meaning of the "method" is to facilitate more and more felicitous experiences leading to PCEs.

Ingram wrote with a clarity and confidence suggesting that he really knew what he was talking about

Indeed he did. I too was (intellectually) aware of the spiritual experience that he was referring to, which is in a word called "acceptance" of things as they are.

But when I see his posts now on Dharma Overground, he sounds very confused.

"very confused", eh? How on earth can what he wrote so clearly, especially the following extract, sound like an expression of high confusion?

[Daniel] One of the interesting things about arahatship is that is conveys this fantastic clarity about that particular form of unclarity, once one has a proper contrast between it and the PCE, and having gone back and forth probably 100 times in the last 4 months between the two, I think I get the two pretty well at this point, though there may yet be surprises and fine points, and I suspect there are.

Well, I would say that [the possibility of completely eradicating the root of all misery/mayhem of the world] is completely (100%) bullshit - as are your references to "24x7 sensuous delight". You do not achieve that just by getting rid of "malice and sorrow" -

The word malice and sorrow refers to the feelings, and not unfortunate life situations (such as losing a large portion of one's financial wealth).

The 'sensual delight' I speak of is an inherent quality of PCE - sensuous experience bereft of identity/feelings.

[...] unless we are using the word "delight" in some innovative sense that would include, say, having your face torn off by a chimpanzee, to name just one disgusting example that I ran across recently of what can happen to a person in this world.

Physical pain is not extirpated in an actual freedom; for otherwise one could sit on a hot stove and still not know that one's bum is on fire. What is extirpated is the affective reaction to this physical pain.

Richard, and other actually free people, have spoken of this delight being uninterrupted even in the presence of physical pain.

AF [is] nothing more than a sort of post-anti-metaphysical rational-emotive therapy.

Yet Rational emotive bevariour theraphy does not eliminate the feelings and identity. Further to the point, here is a gem about REBT from Wikipedia: Much of what we call emotion is nothing more nor less than a certain kind — a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind — of thought. - which perhaps explains why it doesn't go that deeper. (Mr LeDoux's studies shows clearly the feelings come prior to thought; evidenced from the fast neural connections to the amygdala, compared to those to the neo-cortex)

The other critical observation I would want to make is that the idea of getting rid of negative feelings and having only positive feelings I think is, again, bullshit.

I have no idea as to where you got this information from. What the AF method suggests is to increase the moments of felitious feelings, and minimize the 'good' (trusting/loving) and 'bad' (hateful/fearful) feelings ... so as to facilitate a PCE to arise (only in a PCE there are no feelings/identity). Until then - and like Daniel too suggests - the idea is to imitate it in one's affective sphere.

[...] That sort of rational hedonism might even be combined with some of the LW methods.

Being there no feelings to begin with, the condition of PCE has got nothing to do with hedonism at all.

But please don't kid us or yourself that something like AF is the key to frickin' world utopia.

No, not at all. I know perfectly well that I am the only person I can change. Global peace and harmoney (what you call as 'world utopia') is of course only possible when each and every one of us uproots the cause of sorrow/malice (i.e., a sufficient number of people get actually free as to stir the motivation in others)

Well, if everyone adopted Nazism the world would be a lot happier, too.

It is beyond me as to what relation you see between the condition of living without sorrow/malice and nazism.