What an absolutely absurd opinion. I really don't think you appreciate the manifestation of schizophrenia. Would you feel the same about someone suffering from Tourette's for swearing in front of a child?

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.

Yeah, the sadness really shows. I wish I could share your clinical detachment. I guess I'm too PC (as someone else implied) or ignorant of mental illness (as you implied). Let's agree to disagree about our opinion of Owens. He's a deranged and schizophrenic genius, I get it. We can agree that he's brilliant and is producing something really cool.

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.

"You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he says, which is telling."

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.

Wait, who is Owens? Terry Davis is the creator of TempleOS. Please read some of the writing on http://templeos.org and tell me that's anything comparable to Mean Kampf. He's not writing political rhetoric, it's quite literally the ramblings of a mentally ill person.

Calling him a "racist hick" makes several claims. One is that he is a racist. Another is that he is a poorly-educated rural dweller. These are frequently paired because some people think that rural dwellers or the poorly educated or Southerners or whatever are all racist (sure, there's a correlation).

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.