Exhibit A, Exhibit B: Two mysticist, counter-Enlightenment extremists

https://twitter.com/sam_kriss
Sam Kriss: PoMo extremist, conty, self-described 'communist' (I discovered him through entertaining attacks on Neil deGrasse Tyson, Nick Cohen, Alain de Botton and Richard Dawkins, but I knew he was an idiot as soon as I got to the end of the funny vignette at the beginning of his Dawkins piece, when he started gibbering madly about Dawkins' epistemic naivety in a way that shouted, "I am a typical pre-Enlightenment, deranged English Lit Major who has forgotten that some people really do know things (with numbers and equations and all the rest of it)"). Basically, he is dangerously deranged (he is also very emotionally volatile, as one should expect from ideological extremists). He probably thinks that it is impossible to be a lunatic and have a vocabulary as large as he does, and know as much continental (German-Idealist and Parisian) philosophy as he does, but, if so, he is (need I say) wrong. He has never tried to think clearly about anything, and doesn't know how to. Indeed, he is such a muddled thinker that he thinks that there is no such thing as thinking clearly, and has described himself as an "epistemological nihilist". Obviously, it makes no sense to confidently declare oneself an epistemological nihilist, because asserting that no human knows anything is straightforwardly paradoxical, as any smart 8-year-old knows (of course, he'd probably deny that that's even what he means by "epistemological nihilist" (strictly a category error) but there is no other non-incoherent interpretation).  Kriss no doubt thinks that logic is a social construct (why would other cultures worry about coherence?). When I say "no doubt", I am only using slightly hyperbolic language: after all, in his Dawkins piece he talks contemptuously of Dawkins' faith in the "juridical categories" of "proof and evidence". It's both tragic and terrifying that he doesn't realise how (literally) insane this is.
He probably thinks that Bertrand Russell was a 'logocentrist', I know that he mocks "analytic philosophers" (yes, all of them), and I am sure he knows nothing of Bayesian epistemology. If he ever reads this, he will think it laughably Fedoraish, caricaturish, 'analytic' and epistemically naive. Just like a schizophrenic being told that the voices in his head aren't real.
Of course, Kriss also thinks everything is a joke, and spends almost all his time being sardonic and wry. No doubt being an epistemological nihilist is itself a joke. No doubt it doesn't matter to Kriss that it doesn't make any sense; indeed, that is probably part of its appeal...
Kriss rejects science and scientific scepticism (he probably thinks that the Enlightenment is "a myth" agrees with Sandra Harding that the Principia Mathematica is Newton's "rape manual", and thinks Galileo discovered nothing - or at least thinks it funny to adopt such positions, just as he thinks it's funny to be a flat-earther), he doesn't believe in interrogating his positions for weaknesses, and he doesn't believe in trying his best to proportion his beliefs to the evidence. In short, he's a PoMo lunatic.

https://twitter.com/kantbot2000
This is the Twitter profile of the guy who, in a video filmed in the centre of New York, uploaded to Youtube recently, claims that "Trump is a Kantian" who is going to "complete the system of German idealism" and raise "Thule" and "Atlantis" (with some help from "global cooling"). He is a full-time ironist (so much so that I suspect he no longer can tell the difference between his 'ironic' positions and his 'real' ones), a clever Alt-Right troll, a German idealist (who uses his apparent erudition as a means of trolling), a Trump supporter (I suspect there might have been an element of irony in this to start, but I think he enjoys being a Trump supporter (in particular, using his knowledge of German philosophy to exalt Trump)), and misogynist (this is transparent in his early blog posts). He is clearly a person who went off on the wrong path a long time ago, and has been unable to get back.

The Twitter feeds of these two young men are remarkably similar. They make similar ironic tweets and make similar quips. They have a similar sense of humour. They like appealing to esoterica in incongruous contexts as a means of generating laughs. They both know German idealist philosophy. They are both uninterested in rationality, and instead indulge radical mysticism.
They are both extremists.
Are they so different?

I hope that Sam Kriss read this, and I hope he doesn't laugh. But if he does read this, I know he will laugh. Until that preceding sentence, whereupon he will suddenly stop reading and experience a terrifying, earth-shattering epiphany. Upon the conclusion of this epiphany, he will immediately seek out the nearest book by B. Russell.