I want to give urbit a try. I have a planet, but last time I fired it up the latency was so bad that I wasn't having fun. I'll try again sometime.

I can even get behind runes, and I set up abbreviations in Emacs to learn their names. And generally, I like the philosophy of language where short, one syllable, old/middle English words are used in place of the less familiar Latin/Greek derived words. I don't have a problem with revising our existing vocabulary in this way.

But the attitude to type theory strikes me as anti intellectual, precisely because we get nonsense claims about Hindley Milner requiring category theory. This sort of misinformation does no good for anyone.

None whatsoever. Hindley-Milner is in fact used widely in language design because of its relatively good error messages (as well as ease of implementation). Also it really doesn't have much to do with category theory.