Who here thinks that the author of the blog post is female? I did.

I found gender conspicuously absent. Indeed, actual information about anything was conspicuously absent. I was strongly reminded of a curious feature of a flamewar that raged over SF-related blogs in 2009, which came to be called RaceFail.

I only came across that discussion a year after it had ended, through a chance mention somewhere, and was curious enough to look and see what it had all been about. You might think that easy: hyperlinks surely let one follow the discussion back all the way to the original postings that started it? Not at all. The curious pattern was this, and I observed it on all sides of the argument. People who were commenting on a blog post they agreed with would link directly to the specific post, and quote directly from it. People who were commenting on a blog post they disagreed with would not do that. They would link, if at all, only to the top level of the blog, and not quote but only paraphrase its content, or merely allude to it in terms that would convey little unless one had already read it -- and of course, upwards of a year after the event, there would be little possibility of tracking down which of dozens of possible postings they were talking about.

The blog post discussed here is all like that. Clearly, the author disagrees with someone and something, but never says who, what, where, or when. Everything is generality and allusion. To understand the allusions is the entry requirement, as it was for those RaceFail posts. The purpose of such writing is to be understood only by one's own side, to be a nod and a wink to say, "we know what I'm talking about, don't we?", and to leave no definite point for the enemy to attack. The difficulty that one has created for anyone outside the circle to engage with the matter can then be taken as further proof of their evilness.