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Comment by nyolfen | Hacker News Reader

the dude is straight up racist and just because he's eccentric and mentally ill doesn't mean it should be tolerated

If you're referring to him saying "nigger" multiple times, then I think that that to him is more like a a kind of a generic bad-word to go with, and that he's not actually using it in a true "racist" sense.

Of course I agree that just using that word to insult someone classifies as racist, but so far I've never seen anywhere in his comments or rants that he actually argumented something against black people.

Quoting from the first page of @TempleOS's comments (censorship mine, of course):

I spend my days clubbing retard-ns. CLUB! CLUB! DIE N! CLUB! RETARD! N! DIE!! CLUB! N!

Regardless of his mental state, this is not content that I want in any of my online communities.

So that's what the "r---d" censor meant. I've never seen that word bleeped out before.

Right, and the sense of my comment is that this does not necessarily imply that he would not actually work and then fit nice in team with a black guy, for example. That's just how I perceive that..

I don't think he would work and fit in with any person who objects to the casual use of that term, which is hopefully the overwhelming majority of the industry.

Maybe there would be no reason to discuss about that once started working and that habit would probably sink in front of more interesting/important stuff.

One of the features of schizophrenia is creating new words for concepts without realizing how little they match up with other people's definition of those words.

For all we know Terry means nigger as referring to the religious concept of darkness and would insist it has nothing to do with skin colour.

I'm not saying that is the case here, but it very likely could be and I am saying that we're for more clueless when it comes to empathizing with people like Terry than we think we are.

Is he actually racist, or are his moments of unclarity racist?

To determine that might require face-to-face contact and since he is a diagnosed schizophrenic, it might still be unclear.

Even if the racism only comes out during manic periods, it would be difficult to parse that in an online medium. Since very few of us are trained to deal with that sort of episode, it is probably best to avoid the issue entirely.

Why not just ask?

Terry's God is only as coherent as Terry's offerings of executable code on any given day, and He mediates all of Terry's social communication.

The best way to satisfy your vuriosity is to read his internal monologue stuff, which he documents religiously: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Accts/TS/Wb2/Rants/TAD/TADRants.h...

there's no material difference for the purposes of fostering social spaces devoid of racism

Just about all Americans exhibit some racism, although most of it manifests itself in the form of less-obvious, but still insidious, biases and so on, rather than calling people the n-word on Hacker News.

i totally agree but i don't think it serves as any kind of counterpoint to excluding people who use the n-word from participating in discussions

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