On looking at the old Catallaxy

So there was much wailing and grinding of teeth on the weekend from the wingnut Catallaxy club - I was able to spend quite a few merry hours trolling them.  

The site is now deleted - save for some captures done by the National Library.   (Mind you, they have saved some pages of this blog too - so that's not particularly significant in the scheme of things.)

But there is also still, for some reason, a bit of the old version of Catallaxy hanging around the internet - before it moved to its last hosting arrangement, I think.   It's from 2010, and it's interesting to see what the blog was talking about then.

You can see how it was a hotbed for climate change denial/"scepticism".   Rafe was promoting Monckton articles that appeared in Watts Up With That, Sinclair was giving hat tips to arts graduate Delingpole.   He and Chris Berg were apparently in an article in the IPA Review about "Climategate."   Oh, and "Glaciergate" gets a couple of mentions by Sinclair too - that embarrassing but relatively minor, quickly identified, mistake in an IPCC report which no one sensible ever thought demonstrated that climate change science in totality was wrong. 

Move a decade in the future, and the blog was still heavily devoted, mainly from Rafe's posts, to denying climate change and scaremongering about the cost of changing to clean power.   Sinclair  stopped posting about the topic some time ago - maybe he has modified his views, while nonetheless being happy to have Rafe and Moran crap on weekly about how bad renewable energy is, and Steve Kates (literally) call people idiots for believing in AGW at all, and the Left evil.   Who knows?

It was certainly not as if Sinclair was into admitting error - remember the Monty temporary banning in 2014 for pointing out his stagflation call?   

Speaking of economics more generally, here he is praising this assessment of Keynesian economics:

Ultimately, any economic theory, if it is to survive, must withstand repeated attempts to falsify it, repeated exposure to the predictive test that deductive science imposes on its creations. The Keynesian model (I call it this rather than the model of Keynes since no master should ever be judged by the words of his inadequate disciples) was floored by a sequence of empirical failures: an alleged consumption multiplier that regularly under-performed; an alleged inelasticity of aggregate investment to interest rate changes that was notable by its absence; a liquidity trap that failed to manifest itself; a Phillips curve trade-off between the rate of unemployment and the rate of price inflation that proved to be explosively unstable; a flexible exchange- rate system that eliminated final macroeconomic vestiges of fiscal influence. …
…
Dear reader, the Keynesian model never worked; and never will work. It has been resuscitated by opportunistic economists, not because they believe in its merits as an agent of macroeconomic rehabilitation, but because they recognize its political value as a weapon for moving economies from laissez-faire to state capitalism, or (hopefully) beyond that to fully-fledged socialism.

Now, I'm not qualified to understand a lot of those claims - but thanks to Sinclair's failed stagflation warning made a year or so after that post, I can tell that this was probably a load of exaggerated bollocks.   So, yeah, Catallaxy was good for that!

Oh, and look:  there's a post in which Sinclair is apparently endorsing Nigel Farage "Telling the EU where to get off".   Gee, Brexit has gone so well.   

In the spirit of generosity, and bearing in mind the internet never forgets, if Sinclair would like to appear in comments here and confess his mistakes and errors, he's welcome to.

Heh. 

Update:   someone called Adam has created a clone (in appearance) of the deleted Catallaxy site, and all the people who regularly posted there have migrated to the open thread.  I see Sinclair has turned up with this message:

Ah yes:  that would be the blog where I voluntarily stopped commenting because an old regular could make a comment about how a woman (I forget who) should be "kicked in the slats" and Sinclair wouldn't moderate it.   Or more recently, where a male commenter could call an apparent rape victim in the news "a dud root", and again, the comment remained there.   

Sinclair let it turn into a toilet that he would not moderate to any reasonable standard of civility.  Golf clap for libertarianism, hey.  

As I explained in my comment at monty's post in 2014:

....I can't tolerate the lack of overall moderation of the place any more. I have a theory that Sinclair might consider the blog threads are a sort of "test" of how libertarian communities might self moderate - if someone says something outrageous and offensive, then others might try to pull them in line and a certain natural level of acceptable propriety prevail.

In fact, this happens exceptionally rarely, so that the blog threads have become full of sexist and (for want of a better word) "homophobic" comments which, if I overheard in a pub, would offend me and make me slide away from the group. And when they get onto racism issues it can get exceptionally ugly, and pretty dumb.

As I have said over the years, it particularly annoys me when the women who comment there let offensive comments slide (IT and his twice made comment now that a woman deserves a "kick in the slats", for example.) And that Sinclair, despite his presumed friendship with Tim Wilson, rarely does a thing about the way homosexuality is used for the purpose of ridicule.

Sorry, but blog moderation that extends to "no one uses the 'c' word, and if I notice something I think is a bit OTT I might delete it" has made the place too ugly to be seen in.

So, yeah, it was a "wonderful" place for intense and offensive sexism, homophobia, and racism (although I have not preserved examples of the latter - but even JC would complain about that, so I am far from imagining it.)

It was a toilet that deserved to go, and the world is a better place that it has.