8 ms·

ESR, is, if nothing else, the champion of his own relevance. I've never really been fond of his work, though he seems like a nice enough guy. But he's just ano

by debacle 12y ago

ESR, is, if nothing else, the champion of his own relevance. I've never really been fond of his work, though he seems like a nice enough guy. But he's just another OSS hacker. Bruce Perens has accomplished far more with far less controversy and self-fluffing.

comice 12y ago
"ESR, is, if nothing else, the champion of his own relevance" wonderful.
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
"a nice enough guy" Nope: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26
- jayvanguard 12y ago
  Yeah, I unsubscribed from his blog "Armed and Dangerous." He thinks he thinks he is smarter and more knowledgable about general topics than he really is. It should be named "Just Enough Knowledge to be Dangerous." Logic only gets you so far when your base of knowledge is very limited in a subject.
- pothibo 12y ago
  Thanks for the link. He actually compares homosexual with pedophiles. I want to have absolutely nothing to do with such a degenerate.
  - tellitlikeitis 12y ago
    This is great. He's pointing out the facts! Your comment appears to be a classic case of projection. How is pointing out the facts about homosexual behavior a characteristic of a degenerate? Au contraire, your protestations signify you as a likely degenerate.
  - pothibo 12y ago
    For those of you brave souls who downvote me. I'm wondering which part of my statement you disagree with. - You think homosexual are pedophiles? - It's not important what he thinks about homosexuals. You're going to support him by using his software. If he had held the same hate speech about women in 2014, everyone would be here talking how imbecile this guy is.
    - dubfan 12y ago
      Maybe people are downvoting you because you're showing an incapability to distinguish between someone's expressed beliefs and their personal character?
      - astrodust 12y ago
        Aren't those two a little intermingled? "Apart from the fact that he hates Jews, he's a really nice guy!"
    - edwintorok 12y ago
      People can have different political, religious, etc. views than you, but why should that influence whether you use his software or not? Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it? What if those views (or your own) change over time and you disagree with them?
      - icebraining 12y ago
        (ESR aside) Why not? If I believe that someone's exposed views are harmful, doesn't it make sense to avoid increasing his/her overall influence? I mean, the fact that we're discussing ESR's views on pedophilia shows that his influence in an unrelated area (software) increases the exposure of those views. If he was just a nobody like me, would we be discussing his blog post on Catholic priests? Not likely. Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it? I sure don't, but why does that mean one should actively ignore gained knowledge?
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Wow.. classy guy. That said, people can change. 12 years is a long time.. does he still think that way?
    - tptacek 12y ago
      http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1063 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1063
      - Karunamon 12y ago
        Thank you for locating this. After reading, I'm not sure what to think. I do not have the subject matter familiarity necessary to take a position on his claims, nor does he cite anything other than personal experience and his own research. If his historical claims with regard to homosexuality are correct, then I can say with great certainty that his other claim as to how these facts will be interpreted in the modern climate is distressingly right. Worth noting that he takes no position on the rights of homosexual couples. The only value judgement made therein is that (assuming the information used to reach this conclusion is correct) that historically, homosexuality been associated with some pretty ugly and downright evil things. If they're not correct, then this amounts to a very, very disgusting and ugly smear piece worthy of groups like the infamous Westboro church. So now I wonder.. which is it? If it weren't for the Eich/Mozilla thing from a few months ago, I'd have looked at these claims a lot less skeptically coming from a technologist who's intimately familiar with logic, and who would necessarily place facts above all else when it comes to arguing a point. That's not a thing I can do anymore, especially considering the tendency of actual bigots to couch their own personal prejudices in superficially-correct-sounding scientific language.
        tptacek 12y ago
        I'm not trying to interpret him, just to answer the question about whether there's evidence that his thoughts have evolved. Here's a more recent example: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5651 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5651 The only analysis I'll give for it is that I was also disturbed by the idea of Eich being forced out, but would never donate a penny to organizations fighting marriage equality; two wrongs can't make a right. OK I give up. I find his thoughts on race to be alarming, too. It's hard for me to reconcile the idea that ESR's beliefs are germane and troubling with the principle of tolerance for other people's beliefs. But: I think there's something substantively and intrinsically disturbing about the specific things ESR says. I don't think I'd have trouble being friends with someone who opposed marriage equality. But I do have trouble with what ESR says about LGBT people. It might be the whole package of positions that ESR takes, not just about LGBT issues but about race, politics, &c. I have friends with very conservative beliefs (though none, to my knowledge, have ever argued that homosexuality is inextricably bound with pederasty). But none of them have a cohesive worldview in which their own attributes just happen to define the ideal human, compared against which all nonconformant humans are inferior. ESR, on the other hand...
  - boards2x 12y ago
    Up voted.
  - angersock 12y ago
    Not only does he compare them, he contrasts that societal relationship over time. Doing so doesn't make him a degenerate. A windbag, sure, or a liar, but degenerate is a particular term. Do you disagree with his premises or his facts, or just his conclusions? For example, I think he's wrong because he doesn't cite sources for his assertions about the demographics of various types of porn or sources for his claims of historical homosexuality/pedophilia. But that's a straight matter of "Where did you get this idea from?".
- sigzero 12y ago
  That is from 2002. Does he still hold those views?
  - astrodust 12y ago
    Given he's rebuilding RCS, I think we already know the answer.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Here's ESR in 2013 arguing that transexuality and gender identity issues are disorders comparable to schizophrenia. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5015 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5015
    - angersock 12y ago
      Core question (and a fair one) is raised here: "So, why do we not treat self-reported transsexuals as insane and in need of treatment for a delusional disorder? I can anticipate a lot of possible replies; the trouble is that all of them apply just as well (or just as poorly) to the case of BIID or delusional paranoia." ESR is a blowhard conservative, but he does tend to at least have nuance in his position, which you seem to be ignoring.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        You really think it's fair to consider whether everyone with gender identity issues might simply be delusional?
        coolsunglasses 12y ago
        This is a hostile environment, nobody can have a rational conversation about this without burning a lot karma (of which you have more to spare). Nobody here except those that have those experiences has anything useful to say about non-cis gender identity. Possibly also psychiatrists/psychologists not married to a particular ideology on the topic. From my admittedly few conversations with transgendered people, it's complicated and there are no easy answers to what precisely it is. Part of the problem is you're using "delusional" stigmatically, which damns you and poisons the conversation.
- _delirium 12y ago
  See also his attempts to take credit for other people's work on ncurses: http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-license.html http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-license.html. I don't think I would want to work with him on a project.
  - mrcsparker 12y ago
    The part of that thread that I found interesting were RMS's replies. He seems very measured.
- tellitlikeitis 12y ago
  "Homosexual activists, when challenged on this point, like to retort that older men nailing barely-nubile teenage girls is far more common. And in absolute terms it is — but only because there are twenty-five to a hundred times more straight men than there are gay men in the world (reliable figures for the incidence of male homosexuality range between 1% and 4%). Per capita among gays, pederasty is more frequent than among straights by a factor of between three and ten, depending on whose statistics you believe — and the North American Man-Boy Love Association, actively advocating pederasty and pedophilia, is welcomed at gay-pride events everywhere." Sounds like some people can't handle the truth. I'm sure the HN crowd don't have a problem with truth... do they?
- hughw 12y ago
  There's nothing un-nice about that article. It's a reasoned argument. You may disagree with its conclusion, and you can write your own refutation of it. But it has nothing to do with ESR's niceness.
  - dubfan 12y ago
    This is the Internet in 2014. We don't refute controversial arguments, we scream "wow, just wow, hate speech, what a bigot", publicly shame and defame their character and derail their careers. We're enlightened now.
    - pessimizer 12y ago
      I agree with the sentiment, but I think that attempting to refute an argument and being personally disgusted by people who make a particular argument, not doing business with them, and advising others not to do business with them are not mutually exclusive choices. You don't want to tip into the "people hating me because of something I said is an abridgement of my god-given right to free-speech" crowd. You have to be responsible for both what you say, and also for how people interpret what you say in order to be an effective communicator.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      What is there to refute? He presents no evidence of the claims.
    - makmanalp 12y ago
      The comments section provides some very decent counterarguments which ESR seems to skip over. I have to say, I'm a bit surprised. I'd read his writings on open source and I thought they were always interesting if not fully convincing, but I never knew this side of him and I'm not too impressed.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  Eric Raymond, everybody: "Nor is it any good thing that “youths” now behave as though they think they’re operating with a kind of immunity. We saw this in Ferguson, when Michael Brown apparently believed he could could beat up a Pakistani shopkeeper and then assault a cop without fearing consequences. (“What are you going to do, shoot me?” he sneered, just before he was shot) As he found out, eventually that shit’ll get you killed; it would have been much better for everybody if he hadn’t been encouraged to believe that his skin color gave him a free pass." " It’s not clear to me that this kind of indulgence is any better – even for blacks themselves – than the old racist arrangement in which blacks “knew their place” and were systematically cowed into submission to the law. After all – if it needs pointing out again – the victims of black crime and trash culture are mainly other blacks. Press silence is empowering thugs."
  - pjscott 12y ago
    Full text: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6286 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6286
- wglb 12y ago
  And there is this: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/04/msg00197.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/04/msg00197.html
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- talideon 12y ago
  I don't think that being the maintainer of the Jargon File can be said to mean that he worked on defining the meaning of 'hacker'.
bhaak 12y ago
> ESR, is, if nothing else, the champion of his own relevance What an apt description. I never have had much confidence in the coding that ESR has done. Just look at fetchmail and how that one has lost uncountable mails because of poor design. Although he seems to think highly of his coding skills but I always had the impression that he's one of those hackers that really just hack together solutions. If a problem comes up there's always a fix to be committed. I wouldn't want such a programmer on my team. But he's always been good with words and as an OSS lobbyist he was a well needed figure that put the software first and not politics as RMS did.

by debacle 12y ago

comice 12y ago

"ESR, is, if nothing else, the champion of his own relevance" wonderful.

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago

"a nice enough guy" Nope: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26

jayvanguard 12y ago
Yeah, I unsubscribed from his blog "Armed and Dangerous." He thinks he thinks he is smarter and more knowledgable about general topics than he really is. It should be named "Just Enough Knowledge to be Dangerous." Logic only gets you so far when your base of knowledge is very limited in a subject.
pothibo 12y ago
Thanks for the link. He actually compares homosexual with pedophiles. I want to have absolutely nothing to do with such a degenerate.
- tellitlikeitis 12y ago
  This is great. He's pointing out the facts! Your comment appears to be a classic case of projection. How is pointing out the facts about homosexual behavior a characteristic of a degenerate? Au contraire, your protestations signify you as a likely degenerate.
- pothibo 12y ago
  For those of you brave souls who downvote me. I'm wondering which part of my statement you disagree with. - You think homosexual are pedophiles? - It's not important what he thinks about homosexuals. You're going to support him by using his software. If he had held the same hate speech about women in 2014, everyone would be here talking how imbecile this guy is.
  - dubfan 12y ago
    Maybe people are downvoting you because you're showing an incapability to distinguish between someone's expressed beliefs and their personal character?
    - astrodust 12y ago
      Aren't those two a little intermingled? "Apart from the fact that he hates Jews, he's a really nice guy!"
  - edwintorok 12y ago
    People can have different political, religious, etc. views than you, but why should that influence whether you use his software or not? Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it? What if those views (or your own) change over time and you disagree with them?
    - icebraining 12y ago
      (ESR aside) Why not? If I believe that someone's exposed views are harmful, doesn't it make sense to avoid increasing his/her overall influence? I mean, the fact that we're discussing ESR's views on pedophilia shows that his influence in an unrelated area (software) increases the exposure of those views. If he was just a nobody like me, would we be discussing his blog post on Catholic priests? Not likely. Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it? I sure don't, but why does that mean one should actively ignore gained knowledge?
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Wow.. classy guy. That said, people can change. 12 years is a long time.. does he still think that way?
  - tptacek 12y ago
    http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1063 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1063
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      Thank you for locating this. After reading, I'm not sure what to think. I do not have the subject matter familiarity necessary to take a position on his claims, nor does he cite anything other than personal experience and his own research. If his historical claims with regard to homosexuality are correct, then I can say with great certainty that his other claim as to how these facts will be interpreted in the modern climate is distressingly right. Worth noting that he takes no position on the rights of homosexual couples. The only value judgement made therein is that (assuming the information used to reach this conclusion is correct) that historically, homosexuality been associated with some pretty ugly and downright evil things. If they're not correct, then this amounts to a very, very disgusting and ugly smear piece worthy of groups like the infamous Westboro church. So now I wonder.. which is it? If it weren't for the Eich/Mozilla thing from a few months ago, I'd have looked at these claims a lot less skeptically coming from a technologist who's intimately familiar with logic, and who would necessarily place facts above all else when it comes to arguing a point. That's not a thing I can do anymore, especially considering the tendency of actual bigots to couch their own personal prejudices in superficially-correct-sounding scientific language.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        I'm not trying to interpret him, just to answer the question about whether there's evidence that his thoughts have evolved. Here's a more recent example: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5651 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5651 The only analysis I'll give for it is that I was also disturbed by the idea of Eich being forced out, but would never donate a penny to organizations fighting marriage equality; two wrongs can't make a right. OK I give up. I find his thoughts on race to be alarming, too. It's hard for me to reconcile the idea that ESR's beliefs are germane and troubling with the principle of tolerance for other people's beliefs. But: I think there's something substantively and intrinsically disturbing about the specific things ESR says. I don't think I'd have trouble being friends with someone who opposed marriage equality. But I do have trouble with what ESR says about LGBT people. It might be the whole package of positions that ESR takes, not just about LGBT issues but about race, politics, &c. I have friends with very conservative beliefs (though none, to my knowledge, have ever argued that homosexuality is inextricably bound with pederasty). But none of them have a cohesive worldview in which their own attributes just happen to define the ideal human, compared against which all nonconformant humans are inferior. ESR, on the other hand...
- boards2x 12y ago
  Up voted.
- angersock 12y ago
  Not only does he compare them, he contrasts that societal relationship over time. Doing so doesn't make him a degenerate. A windbag, sure, or a liar, but degenerate is a particular term. Do you disagree with his premises or his facts, or just his conclusions? For example, I think he's wrong because he doesn't cite sources for his assertions about the demographics of various types of porn or sources for his claims of historical homosexuality/pedophilia. But that's a straight matter of "Where did you get this idea from?".
sigzero 12y ago
That is from 2002. Does he still hold those views?
- astrodust 12y ago
  Given he's rebuilding RCS, I think we already know the answer.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Here's ESR in 2013 arguing that transexuality and gender identity issues are disorders comparable to schizophrenia. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5015 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5015
  - angersock 12y ago
    Core question (and a fair one) is raised here: "So, why do we not treat self-reported transsexuals as insane and in need of treatment for a delusional disorder? I can anticipate a lot of possible replies; the trouble is that all of them apply just as well (or just as poorly) to the case of BIID or delusional paranoia." ESR is a blowhard conservative, but he does tend to at least have nuance in his position, which you seem to be ignoring.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      You really think it's fair to consider whether everyone with gender identity issues might simply be delusional?
      - coolsunglasses 12y ago
        This is a hostile environment, nobody can have a rational conversation about this without burning a lot karma (of which you have more to spare). Nobody here except those that have those experiences has anything useful to say about non-cis gender identity. Possibly also psychiatrists/psychologists not married to a particular ideology on the topic. From my admittedly few conversations with transgendered people, it's complicated and there are no easy answers to what precisely it is. Part of the problem is you're using "delusional" stigmatically, which damns you and poisons the conversation.
_delirium 12y ago
See also his attempts to take credit for other people's work on ncurses: http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-license.html http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-license.html. I don't think I would want to work with him on a project.
- mrcsparker 12y ago
  The part of that thread that I found interesting were RMS's replies. He seems very measured.
tellitlikeitis 12y ago
"Homosexual activists, when challenged on this point, like to retort that older men nailing barely-nubile teenage girls is far more common. And in absolute terms it is — but only because there are twenty-five to a hundred times more straight men than there are gay men in the world (reliable figures for the incidence of male homosexuality range between 1% and 4%). Per capita among gays, pederasty is more frequent than among straights by a factor of between three and ten, depending on whose statistics you believe — and the North American Man-Boy Love Association, actively advocating pederasty and pedophilia, is welcomed at gay-pride events everywhere." Sounds like some people can't handle the truth. I'm sure the HN crowd don't have a problem with truth... do they?
hughw 12y ago
There's nothing un-nice about that article. It's a reasoned argument. You may disagree with its conclusion, and you can write your own refutation of it. But it has nothing to do with ESR's niceness.
- dubfan 12y ago
  This is the Internet in 2014. We don't refute controversial arguments, we scream "wow, just wow, hate speech, what a bigot", publicly shame and defame their character and derail their careers. We're enlightened now.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    I agree with the sentiment, but I think that attempting to refute an argument and being personally disgusted by people who make a particular argument, not doing business with them, and advising others not to do business with them are not mutually exclusive choices. You don't want to tip into the "people hating me because of something I said is an abridgement of my god-given right to free-speech" crowd. You have to be responsible for both what you say, and also for how people interpret what you say in order to be an effective communicator.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    What is there to refute? He presents no evidence of the claims.
  - makmanalp 12y ago
    The comments section provides some very decent counterarguments which ESR seems to skip over. I have to say, I'm a bit surprised. I'd read his writings on open source and I thought they were always interesting if not fully convincing, but I never knew this side of him and I'm not too impressed.
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
Eric Raymond, everybody: "Nor is it any good thing that “youths” now behave as though they think they’re operating with a kind of immunity. We saw this in Ferguson, when Michael Brown apparently believed he could could beat up a Pakistani shopkeeper and then assault a cop without fearing consequences. (“What are you going to do, shoot me?” he sneered, just before he was shot) As he found out, eventually that shit’ll get you killed; it would have been much better for everybody if he hadn’t been encouraged to believe that his skin color gave him a free pass." " It’s not clear to me that this kind of indulgence is any better – even for blacks themselves – than the old racist arrangement in which blacks “knew their place” and were systematically cowed into submission to the law. After all – if it needs pointing out again – the victims of black crime and trash culture are mainly other blacks. Press silence is empowering thugs."
- pjscott 12y ago
  Full text: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6286 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6286
wglb 12y ago
And there is this: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/04/msg00197.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/04/msg00197.html

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

talideon 12y ago
I don't think that being the maintainer of the Jargon File can be said to mean that he worked on defining the meaning of 'hacker'.

bhaak 12y ago

> ESR, is, if nothing else, the champion of his own relevance What an apt description. I never have had much confidence in the coding that ESR has done. Just look at fetchmail and how that one has lost uncountable mails because of poor design. Although he seems to think highly of his coding skills but I always had the impression that he's one of those hackers that really just hack together solutions. If a problem comes up there's always a fix to be committed. I wouldn't want such a programmer on my team. But he's always been good with words and as an OSS lobbyist he was a well needed figure that put the software first and not politics as RMS did.