That’s my 2 cents but everyone has their own interpretation.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
Although WikiQuote has some but not all of them (when quoting him be sure to put an attribution lest somebody think you're saying those words):
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S Raymond: http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=129
"A clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he [Steven den Beste] is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can't live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we've done but for what we are." -Eric S Raymond: http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_armedndangero...
"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." -Eric S Raymond When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. "Geeks Win: A survey of the oddballs who write the codes that make the 21st-century world go round". The New York Times Book Review: p. BR18. 4 November 2001. ISSN 03624331. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Serial_...
A lot of people including Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris etc. have pointed out the dangers of islam and why in modern times it is the possibly the most dangerous religion. That does not make them or ESR an islamophobe.
"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." -Eric S Raymond
Well, Sam Harris did get into trouble for promoting racial profiling for terrorism.
In any case, what I remember from ESR's blog (been about a decade since I read it), he did have a stance similar to "If you claim to be Muslim, I will assume you are in favor of X unless you make a statement renouncing it" (where X was something related to terrorism, etc). Ditto for famous Muslim figures - requiring a public statement for them to be OK in his book. Things like "If the Imam of your mosque is not denouncing terrorism every Friday then he is likely a closet terrorist supporter" (like they don't have anything else to preach about in villages in Indonesia?).
He also did not welcome dialogue on the topic. When someone would post a comment confronting him on his blog, he pretty much said "It's my blog and I can say what I want - you are just a guest here, and I delete comments I don't like," While it's his right to do so, it's not exactly the attitude of someone looking for disconfirming perspectives or dialogue.
(In fact, I think most of his horrible stuff were when responding to comments on his blog, not the actual blog posts).
Not sure he still has those posts up on his blog.
Personally, I think he's a horrible person. However, I'm against an outright ban of his stuff on HN. He was an important figure in the free software world, and did make very useful contributions with all the documentation he wrote.
>For anyone who believe that racial equality is an important goal, this is absolutely horrible news. Which is why a lot of well-intentioned people refuse to look at these facts, and will attempt to shout down anyone who speaks them in public. There have been several occasions on which leading psychometricians have had their books canceled or withdrawn by publishers who found the actual scientific evidence about IQ so appalling that they refused to print it.
>Unfortunately, denial of the facts doesn’t make them go away. Far from being meaningless, IQ may be the single most important statistic about human beings, in the precise sense that differences in g probably drive individual and social outcomes more than any other single measurable attribute of human beings.
And here he makes the main point:
>And that is actually a valuable hint about how to get beyond racism. A black man with an IQ of 85 and a white man with an IQ of 85 are about equally likely to have the character traits of poor impulse control and violent behavior associated with criminality — and both are far more likely to have them than a white or black man with an IQ of 110. If we could stop being afraid of IQ and face up to it, that would give us an objective standard that would banish racism per se. IQ matters so much more than skin color that if we started paying serious attention to the former, we might be able to stop paying attention to the latter.
I don't see how you could honestly read all this as racist. I'd imagine similar reasoning goes for the rest of your quotes.
Combining that with the questionable value of IQ in the first place, making these kinds of arguments without considering the whole picture are setting themselves up for appearing racist.
If you believe IQ is completely genetic, then a statement that more blacks have a lower IQ can be seen as racist against blacks.
But if you believe IQ is malleable (fixable to some extent), then the statement that more blacks have a lower IQ can be seen as a lambasting of the system, and empathy towards the black community.
Personally I think ESR's goal is the latter, a declaration that the black community has an IQ problem, and we need to think about how to fix that rather than dismissing them.
This test would also need to apply across cultures and communities.
Maybe you’re just playing devil’s advocate, but I can’t understand how anyone can make these arguments without serious scientific evidence.
We shouldn’t be making statements on entire groups of people with our beliefs. Also, people of color are genetically identical to those not of color.
"The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots." -Eric S Raymond
"... The minimum level of training required to make someone effective as a self defense shooter is not very high... unfortunately, this doesn't cover the BLM crowd, which would have an average IQ of 85 if it's statistically representative of American blacks as a whole. I've never tried to train anyone that dim and wouldn't want to." -Eric S Raymond
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848
Empathy, riiiiight. How about "contempt".
Your first point:
> If you believe IQ is completely genetic, then a statement that more blacks have a lower IQ can be seen as racist against blacks.
The evidence is that parts of what is measured in an IQ test is indeed genetic. There are people with genetic problems which, for example, make those people unable to advance beyond the mental skills of a baby.
However, there is no evidence that whatever it is that an IQ test measures has any association with the genetics of black skin, and the evidence against a causative relationship continues to grow.
Bear in mind that the genetic diversity of people with black skin is much higher than that of people with white skin, and the genetics show a "white race" is NOT a meaningful genetic concept.
Your second point:
> if you believe IQ is malleable (fixable to some extent), then the statement that more blacks have a lower IQ can be seen as a lambasting of the system, and empathy towards the black community.
As codezero pointed out, the question that must be addressed first is, is IQ testing meaningful, and if so, what does it measure?
A large body of evidence shows that IQ testing was developed alongside "scientific racism", and definitely used as part of the American eugenics programs. There's also a long line of justified complaints that many of the tests were "Eurocentric", and not just in knowledge of facts but also on how it relates to certain cultural viewpoints.
As a result, most of the people who make an argument based on IQ, rather than economic inequality or systemic racism, are on shaky grounds to start with, so must make a much harder effort to justify their arguments - something that Raymond hasn't done. As he styles himself an anthropologist, he must surely know the issues. His interpretation, as best as I can tell, is that there's a conspiracy against talking about the truth.
My own interpretation is that he's wrong, and that "the truth" is mostly an expression of racist beliefs combined with cherry-picked information and misinterpreted statistics.
Going back to how you "explained why ... others do not think it's a racist statement."
Do you agree that a racist might make a racist comment and not think it's racist? So your clarification might be completely correct, but still describe an expression of a racist viewpoint.
The most influential anti-vaxxer don't say that vaccination should be banned. They instead "caution" about unexpected consequences, and big-pharma coverups, and the like.
The most influential racists no longer cry out "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever".
Raymond has a long history of saying things that a racist would agree with, and it's much more likely that your interpretation of his non-rascist intent is not correct.
For example, "bullets slathered in pork fat", mentioned in another subthread of this discussion, is a not uncommon xenophobic phrase. The bullet is to kill Muslims, and the pork fat alludes to religious prohibitions on eating pork. The phrase is constructed to imply that Muslims should be killed, and desecrated in such a way they cannot enter heaven. It's also based on a false understanding of Islam.
(It also echoes complaints by both Muslims and Hindus in India about cultural suppression during the rule of the British East Indian Company. The grease for the Enfield P-53 rifle cartridges could contain beef and pork tallow, which was offensive to soldiers who were adherents of either religions. This helped lead to Indian Rebellion of 1857.)
The quote comes from Raymond's comment on NadaNet, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090624235730/http://www.catb.o... . NadaNet was "a network of hackers formed to support the democratic revolution in Iran. Our mission is to help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize — a network beyond the censorship or control of the Iranian regime."
He also wrote on that page "I already got my jihadi death threat from Iran in 2006 before NedaNet" which is itself odd as, quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihadism "The term jihadist is almost exclusively used to describe Sunni extremists". Yet "90–95% of Iranians associate themselves with the Shia branch of Islam, the official state religion, and about 5–10% with the Sunni and Sufi branches of Islam" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Iran .
I don't know what that death threat was, but characterizing it as 'jihadi' when coming from Iran seems based in ignorance - which is something that a racist would easily do but something any anthropologist deserving of the description should know to avoid.
I pointed out that the other poster was being unfair, and I guess you expected that doubling down was going to get more of my time?
I don't know what you expected, but whatever it is, you were wrong. There are entirely too many jackasses willing to scream racism, and I'm too fucking old to do anything but dismiss them.
I said that you were wrong that no one else cares for the points that DonHopkins is raising.
I pointed out that you were being unfair to the other poster. Yes, there are interpretations of what Raymond has written which are not racist. Just like there are statements by anti-vaxxers which are not anti-vaccination.
However, given the context of what Raymond writes, your non-racist interpretation does not seem to be valid.
The implication here is that I'm racist. You then go on to explain that having an opinion that a racist would agree with is problematic.
Consider the phrase "we need to be cautious about vaccinations." That's true. Everyone agrees that that's true. The medical system is set up to be cautious about vaccinations.
You can say it without being an anti-vaxxer at all, and support the current vaccination scheme.
But an anti-vaxxer will say that we need to be cautious well beyond what has been demonstrated to be a correct level of caution.
So, if someone makes that statement you CANNOT TELL if someone is an anti-vaxxer or not. You must look to the larger context.
Similarly, a non-racist can make the statement "that more blacks have a lower IQ can be seen as a lambasting of the system, and empathy towards the black community".
But so can a racist. A racist who accepts the decades of racially biased IQ testing might conclude that we need to treat blacks with special empathy the way that children or pets need empathy, and lambast the system of racial equality put into place by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as being unrealistic.
Thus, your interpretation cannot, by itself, be read as something that only non-racists would agree with.
Even if non-racists CAN and DO agree with it.
Looking at the larger context of Raymond's writings, he's a racist. Not an overt racist in the George Wallace mold, but clearly a racist along the lines of the pseudoscientific "scientific racism" which has long since been disproven.
I'm done.
Even a basic understanding of US history shows that women were second-class citizens. They did not have the right to vote, were prohibited from many jobs, and often received lower wages even for equal or better work.
One of the justifications for the so-called "protection laws" for women comes from empathy. The belief was that women were not as intelligent and more frail than men, so needed special laws to protect them, their morals, and their ability to become mothers.
If empathy based on an incorrect perception of what women can and want to do could support the highly sexist laws of the 1800s, I see no reason why a similar sort of empathy based on the incorrect perception of what black people can and want to do could only be perceived as non-racist.
I have a special empathy towards babies. I think they must be treated different than how we treat adults. I don't think they should have the right to vote, or to carry arms. I think my views are based on a correct perception of their abilities.
If I were to apply that same empathy to black men, and infantilize them, then I would be racist, yes.
Russ Nelson made a ham-fisted attempt to emulate Raymond's standard technique in his "Blacks are Lazy" posting, but it cost him his job as President of the Open Source Initiative.
But ESR threw down the gauntlet and made a full throated public defense of Russ's "Blacks are Lazy" premise, by attacking the people who wanted him removed as "fools" and "thugs" (dog whistle for the n-word).
Raymond actually wanted OSI to get into a public knock-down drag-out fight with the "social justice warriors" who wanted Nelson to resign, at whatever cost in cash, credibility, alienating minorities, and endangering the mission of the OSI. Not exactly a shining example of leadership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la...
Note that although Russell withdrew the article, and admitted it was badly written, Eric S. Raymond is on the record as having defended it by accusing people asking Russell to step down as being "fools and thugs".
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/New-OSI-Presi...
Eric S. Raymond wrote: “The people who knew Russ as a Quaker, a pacifist and a gentleman, and no racist, but nevertheless pressured OSI to do the responsible thing and fire him in order to avoid political damage should be equally ashamed,” Raymond said. “Abetting somebody elses witch hunt is no less disgusting than starting your own.” “Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”
Which is an admirable trait.
And on that note, I personally think people like ESR are more likely to help fix the problem than those screaming that he's a racist.
How do you fix reality if you refuse to accept reality? I don't know, and neither do they.
Google it.
>"your response goes further in convincing me he isn't racist, just forthright. Which is an admirable trait."
Don't blame other people for forcing you to tolerate intolerance and admire racism. That was 100% your decision.
And to head it off, I'm not white, but much like I don't consider religion that important, I don't consider race that important either.
I'm actually more interested in the new release of .net core than I am in a persons race or religion. Which means I don't ingest news/information sources where these are high up on the list of things talked about. I consider them personal things, much like I don't want to hear about my coworker's sex life.
but hey, maybe my not actively looking for constant negativity in my life makes me a horrible human being? I'm guessing you're going to tell me it does...
Do you really not have any idea what "bullets slathered in pork fat" refers to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la...
Eric S Raymond threw down the gauntlet and defended Russ Nelson's infamous "Blacks are Lazy" article by calling everyone who wanted him to resign his position as president of OSI "fools and thugs", and demanded OSI spend their precious time and resources fighting critics of racism and defending Russ Nelson's racist beliefs which ESR shares, instead of promoting open source software.
http://www.eweek.com/servers/new-osi-president-steps-down
>“Abetting somebody elses witch hunt is no less disgusting than starting your own.” “Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”
I think the telling point is that his most troubling proclamations aren't un-sourced comments he uttered at a bar or off-mic at a conference: they're from his freaking blog. He is completely unapologetic about them.
Sam Harris pics apart one ISIS publication that pushes exactly this point. But of course, I'm talking about ISIS and not your run-of-the-mill Muslim that lives in Britain.
"About one-third of respondents said they would tell the police if they knew someone who was getting involved with supporting terrorism in Syria. The same proportion refused to condemn people who take part in violence against those who mock the Prophet Muhammad. Almost one quarter said they favored replacing the British legal system with Islamic law." - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/world/europe/poll-british...