Truly, truly, truly outrageous

[avram]

Arg, no thanks to John Gruber, I spent some time this afternoon perusing Eric Raymond’s blog. No, he hasn’t gotten any better.

I was amused to see a few election-related posts — all dating from that brief period around the end of August and early September when McCain’s numbers looked good — gloating about how Obama’s campaign is doomed, doomed. Not a single election-related post later than Sep 18th, though.

Not that Raymond is a Republican, he hastens to remind us. But, like most guys in the lowbrow right-wing branch of the libertarian movement, he’s motivated primarily by ressentiment towards liberals, rather than a love of actual liberty.

(No, not all libertarians are like that. Honest, I know some good ones. The bad ones just tend to stick out more in my mind. Maybe that’s my own ressentiment towards right-wingers speaking.)

But far worse was “The Post-Racial Hall of Mirrors”, where he starts off talking about how he had to drive through a Delaware slum, and was revolted by all the black people around him. Not because of their skin color, he assures us, but because they were so fat and sloppy. How he deals with hanging out at SF cons, I dunno. He goes on to explain that he can’t possibly be a racist, because his belief that blacks have lower IQs is based on real science, and besides, he used to bang this hot black chick.

I take Raymond as a warning — that being a smart guy doesn’t keep you from being an idiot. I can easily imagine myself having turned into the same kind of idiot that he is, given different life experiences.

Comments

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I blame you for linking him. Goddamnit, now I'm angry. He's so wrong about "energy density" I want to smack him in his ugly misshapen face.

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

Ressentiment has the subtext of feeling weak or inferior to the object of the ressentiment. Do you really feel weak or inferior to the right wing? It's the mushy middle that enables, and takes advantage of the depredations of, the right wing who make me feel powerless.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I like to think he's gotten worse. I don't remember him having that mean streak twenty or thirty years ago.

Are you sure ressentiment is the right description for either you or Eric? In Eric's case, he's said that he enjoys annoying left-wingers.

[redbird]

So he's practicing garden-variety emotional sadism on the unsuspecting?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That's at least a part of it, but why "unsuspecting"?

[redbird]

"Unsuspecting" on the admittedly untested assumption that he is looking/addressing people who are expecting honest argument and instead getting deliberate nastiness. By honest argument I mean that someone is defending a position they in fact hold, and trying to give valid arguments for it. They may be using mistaken information, but not deliberate lies; they may argue that X is bad because in the past it led to Y, but not if X has never been tried or did not lead to Y.

From another angle, honest argument is intended primarily to convince. It may, especially in public fora, be meant mainly to convince the bystanders rather than the person addressed, but if I am arguing honestly, I would be pleased to change the other person's mind and displeased if they responded by screaming insults at me. If the goal is not to convince, but to anger, the other person, it's not honest argument. Outside a Monty Python sketch, that feels dishonest.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks, and it nicely collapses a distinction I was thinking about. I'm not sure whether Eric wants to annoy actual liberals, or to annoy the invented liberals in his head. For purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter. And either way, it's a bad motivation.

I don't know if Eric argues for anything he thinks is false-- I'm inclined to think he doesn't. I suspect he's framing things he believes in more aggressive and insulting terms that would be needed for straight argument.

I also suspect that after enough years of taking pleasure in annoying liberals, he's drawn to bad arguments which will annoy them, like his nonsense about Palin.

[avram]

Actually, I thought his piece on Palin wasn't too bad. I just skimmed it, but I was expecting a Rich Lowry-style wankfest.

It's true that most modern liberals have no idea of what a real right-wing extremist believes, just like most modern conservatives can't tell the difference between a liberal and a leftist.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of Read My Lipstick, not the more serious piece, which I seem to have missed.

[avram]

Oh, that. Yeah, that was pretty stupid.

And pretty emblematic of one of ESR's main writing problems. He's got a hefty chunk of ego invested in the notion that, as a libertarian, he's hovering above the partisan fray with his vast and cool and unsympathetic intellect, analyzing us in an objective manner.

But he's not. His emotions are as fully entangled as those of any life-long Big Two Party member. Maybe moreso. Plenty of actual Republicans are horrified by Palin, perhaps because they realize that she reflects badly on their party. ESR doesn't care as much about that, because he's seeing everything in terms of whether it gives him an opportunity to taunt liberals and leftists.

[james-angove.livejournal.com]

[Warning: Much, old USENET inside BB follows]

Annoying or not annoying liberals per-se isn't the goal. Its still a bystander effect. This was the underlying premise of the MA/PM attack on on LK on RASFF all those years ago: to indite the idea of being liberal as specifically criminal, and to assault certain kinds of past youthful efforts as self-discovery -especially those mixed the the sort of nostalgia most feel for their early adulthood - and there by indite liberalism as essentially violent. The part where they did there damnedest to make LK cry and feel personal pain was secondary, and largely about MA's need to proof that as a grown up, he's a bigger, better bully than the people he went to highschool with.

[ookpik.livejournal.com]

Nancy, he had that mean streak then, but you rationalized and justified it. I'm glad you've stopped doing that.

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

Those gloating posts are a pointed reminder why Obama supporters shouldn't start celebrating now, no matter how good the polls look. Thank you.

[avram]

Well, it's certainly true that the election ain't over til it's over, but the cases aren't truly parallel. What ESR was celebrating was a brief period when McCain's numbers were slightly higher than Obama's, due to McCain's choice of a surprising running mate, and that period ended when people got tired of the new shiny. The general trend of the past several months has been in Obama's favor, further goosed by the financial crisis, and it would take something unusual and dramatic (or massive vote fraud) to change that trend.

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

True, all true. And I do feel pretty confident. I think any Obama fan who reads 538.com every day has got to feel confident at this point. I just don't want to be calling the race and celebrating a job well done three weeks early, when there's still so much to do. And seeing Raymond look like a total fool with his premature victory lap is extremely helpful to prevent complacency.

[redbird]

Also, his argument about having had a black lover might convince someone he hadn't been a racist then (I hope he wasn't, for her sake). Unfortunately for him, having at one time had a black girlfriend merely puts him in the same category as Strom Thurmond.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Nnng. He's got a real point about classism. "Fat and sloppy" SF fans might get a pass because they're *SF fans*; "fat and sloppy" redneck whites in trailers parks might elicit the same reaction of disgusted as the slum blacks, but if he's urban he might not see them as much.

And I note he didn't seem to say blacks had genetically lower IQ, just that they score lower on IQ as a group, which AFAIK is true, with many plausible reasons other than genetics. But if one is an IQ-elitist, what will matter for interaction is someone's intelligence now, not what it might have been with better nutrition and upbringing.

That he might genuinely be a classist (or culturalist) and IQ-elitist, as opposed to a racist qua race, seems perfectly plausible to me.

[redbird]

I don't see the connection between what you're saying and the comment of mine it appears to be a reply to.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

You seemed to be saying he's racist now.

[redbird]

What I was saying is that the argument being quoted didn't show that he wasn't racist. If someone's best defense against an accusation of prejudice is "I can't be bigoted against people in group X, I had sex with one years ago," I am unconvinced. If that argument were sound, no non-virgin heterosexual men would be sexists; plenty of people, of all races, genders, etc. are willing and even eager to have sex with people they don't consider to be their equals.

It's possible--and I hope true--that ESR isn't a racist. But the fact referred to there does not convincve me of the thing it's being offered as evidence of. The mere fact that he had a black lover once doesn't prove he wasn't racist then, nor would his not having been racist 20 years ago prove that he isn't racist now. (Conversely, someone could have been racist 20 years ago and not be so now: people do change, sometimes for the better.)

For that matter, if someone thinks a particular characteristic is acceptable in their friends of their own race, but not in strangers of a different race, it's not the characteristic that's the difference.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Well, it sounded like more than "had sex with". A lover of some duration whom he respected as an equal.

"if someone thinks a particular characteristic is acceptable in their friends of their own race, but not in strangers of a different race, it's not the characteristic that's the difference."

I'm not sure what that's referring to, unless it's giving a pass to "fat and sloppy" SF fans who are largely white. If I'm right, he'd overlook "fat and sloppy" black SF fans, while being disgusted by "white trash". The presented evidence doesn't say, either way, and I don't see why we should assume full blown racism when he openly attests to classism and IQ elitism and those would fit the data.

[avram]

Look at this piece he wrote five years ago:

And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. And it gets worse: the average IQ of African blacks is lower still, not far above what is considered the threshold of mental retardation in the U.S. And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about 85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather than nurturance effects.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Ah. Not surprising, since that does seem to be the science, if you read up to a certain point (like just short of the Flynn effect...)