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

[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.