graydon: Good to see you around on Advogato! I think what I wrote was unclear: johnw has been very enthusiastic about Haskell recently, and in the light of that it seemed strange to bash Clojure because of the kind of run time commitment it has.
I certainly see the whole question of the grasp of and control over the runtime as being the big issue between high- and low-level languages, and I've been pleased with the direction that research into high-level languages has taken in this respect.
I disagree with only part of what you say: I don't see the sharp distinction you seem to make between LLVM and JVM. Certainly the LLVM is a minimally abstracted VM in a way that the JVM is not, and which does not set out to solve many of the problems that the JVM does, but there is an obvious respect in which they accomplish the same kind of task. Equally it's not absurd to talk of compiling Clojure against non-JVM architecture, just as gcj compiles Java to the gcc runtime.