Who's Terry? And where can I see one of his videos?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdX4uJUwSFwiY3XBvu-F_-Q/vid...
Yes, he is schizophrenic (which does not change the fact that he is a great lowlevel programmer).
He is a racist hick, who happens to be ill. If that's "another" thing, then so be it. Don't really care which came first. I will not let racists duck undercover of his illness. I stop short of being genuinely upset at him, but hate speech is hate speech. Since he has a large-ish audience, his ideas are becoming part of culture. Agree with him or defend him or apologize for his racism all you wish -- you are kinda/sorta part of the problem.
The guy believes lots of crazy things: men in suits are after him, aliens put things in his body, that he has conversations with god about music, etc. He translates random number generators into ASCII attempting to divine messages from god. He writes long-winded nonsensical rants jumping from detailed technical dissertations to rambling about old war movies. Schizophrenia literally means "split mind" -- ideas, concepts, hallucinations attack his brain and he has no basis for dispelling which are grounded in reality and which are not. It's the biological equivalent of radio interference or a loose wire.
A large chunk of the things he writes are unintelligible. Yes, people focus on his work, because it's pretty amazing that somebody suffering so profoundly from an illness can do such interesting (and esoteric) work. The fact that a subset of his schizophrenic attacks include racist language is something I feel sad, not angry about.
I'm not bothered by his racism -- it's too common for me to be really upset by it. What bothers me is how you and others are so quick to point out how cool TempleOS is, and how smart he is, and how his hate speech is OK because he's ill. You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he says, which is telling. Enjoy his streams, hell -- make TempleOS your default OS and mail all of your friends/family a copy of it.
Just consider that white males happen to make up the vast majority of his audience. Blacks and whoever else he hates will have a harder time than you do sympathizing with his hateful speech, schizophrenic or not. Again, Hitler was a schizophrenic but that doesn't make his hateful rhetoric OK does it? Oh wait, Mein Kampf was recently a bestseller in Germany and we have a former Breitbart editor in the White House. Touché.
It's very telling. When someone does something out of mental illness, there is no reasoning them to change their course. When someone does it out of bigotry, there is.
Being schizophrenic is a serious problem, and his technical achievements in the face of them are notable. But it's not a free pass for everything. We can distinguish, for example, between people with mental health problems who are danger to themself and others and those who are not.
It's one thing entirely to rail about aliens, because aliens aren't real. It's another use racial invective and epithets against racial and cultural minorities, because Jews and black people are absolutely real.
Put yourself in the shoes of a jew or black person and watch some of his streams. Then revisit the comments for this story and how they all gush over his unique cool project and wave away his vehement racism as just an unfortunate detail.
Go a little bit further from the curated and (somewhat) tolerant atmosphere of HN, and you'll see Owens' hateful speech being parroted, and being used to legitimatize the promulgation of the already massive undercurrent of racism that lurks in almost every corner of Internet culture.
I hate to confirm Godwin's law, but -- Hitler was also schizophrenic. Seeing an obviously ill person suffer from disease is sad, but it's even sadder to see the social disease of racism so ubiquitous and widely tolerated.
And just in case you really do think I'm "looking for" examples of racism --just last night I joined an IRC channel about my city (DC) to meet people. I had to leave because I heard "nigger" and "brown people get out" one too many times for comfort.