More Words, Deeper Hole

Pournelle describes how his broken bullshit detector works in the first sentence of that section:

I don’t agree with Fred on everything, but he raises a number of really interesting questions, he’s right a lot of the time, and he doesn’t swallow fads.

It's the hallmark of someone who evaluates ideas by rhetorical style and political intent, a style of thinking Pournelle has used for the last sixty years.

It seems unlikely that he's going to change his method in the final years of his life. Rather, one should expect him to get even odder and more gullible as the inevitable processes of aging (and the damage caused by earlier decades of drinking) take their toll on his capacity for critical thinking, which was never terribly strong. It's why conmen prey on the elderly; it's the FOX News business model.