Google is helpful here. There are plenty of articles that have been written about him (speaking as someone else who hadn't heard of him until today). This is the one I'm reading right now: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/
Probably because his blog posts are like millions of words of meandering stream of thought and links to public domain books and you would have to spend the next few months of your free time to read most of his posts? Occasionally funny and insightful, but concise and well-written they are not, burying the real content under mountains of fluff.
I do not know the man's writings. There are many links on that page to things he wrote. So this is the most informative link I am likely to be able to provide.
As for why not read his writings: why not read the writing of the timecube guy, or those of reactionary christian authors? Because I try not to waste my time on idiotic polemic.
If the goal of banning him from the conference was to suppress his ideas, his opponents remind me of George Bush standing beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
The goal of banning him is probably not to "suppress his ideas". I'd imagine the goal is something more like "not allowing the experience of conference attendees to be made a little less pleasant in the service of what is a quirky and maybe interesting but probably pretty marginal technical talk".
Um, as far as I understand, he wasn't banned from attending StrangeLoop, just that he had his talk pulled.
Given that, could we please either clarify this with Alex, or stop claiming this as it just further distorts the truth and politically weaponizes this situation even further?
I don't think you really believe, were the shoe on the other foot and you were the one organizing Strange Loop, that there's nobody you'd consider excluding.
But I would (and have) based on their political actions.
Regardless of how you feel about Yarvin's politics, he's not trying to force them on you. He's not trying to change the way you run your business or conference. On the contrary.
I can't say the same for his opponents however, who as well meaning as they are are too dogmatically driven to notice how nuanced this issue really is. If people like this join a group, they will either try to modify its politics and excise the members who don't fit the new order, or destroy it completely, driven by a belief that they have the moral high ground. And since they primarily work in the realms of words, their primary tactics tend to be in changing and obliterating the meanings of words to control what is being said. They'll alternatively go from claiming that words have no inherent meaning to attempting to redefine existing terms to mean different things to change what other people were trying to say.
The reason Yarvin concerns them is because on some level they believe he shares these same motivations and intents. I have no idea if he does, but I sure hope he doesn't.