After reading, I'm not sure what to think. I do not have the subject matter familiarity necessary to take a position on his claims, nor does he cite anything other than personal experience and his own research.
If his historical claims with regard to homosexuality are correct, then I can say with great certainty that his other claim as to how these facts will be interpreted in the modern climate is distressingly right.
Worth noting that he takes no position on the rights of homosexual couples. The only value judgement made therein is that (assuming the information used to reach this conclusion is correct) that historically, homosexuality been associated with some pretty ugly and downright evil things.
If they're not correct, then this amounts to a very, very disgusting and ugly smear piece worthy of groups like the infamous Westboro church.
So now I wonder.. which is it?
If it weren't for the Eich/Mozilla thing from a few months ago, I'd have looked at these claims a lot less skeptically coming from a technologist who's intimately familiar with logic, and who would necessarily place facts above all else when it comes to arguing a point. That's not a thing I can do anymore, especially considering the tendency of actual bigots to couch their own personal prejudices in superficially-correct-sounding scientific language.
The only analysis I'll give for it is that I was also disturbed by the idea of Eich being forced out, but would never donate a penny to organizations fighting marriage equality; two wrongs can't make a right.
OK I give up.
I find his thoughts on race to be alarming, too.
It's hard for me to reconcile the idea that ESR's beliefs are germane and troubling with the principle of tolerance for other people's beliefs. But: I think there's something substantively and intrinsically disturbing about the specific things ESR says. I don't think I'd have trouble being friends with someone who opposed marriage equality. But I do have trouble with what ESR says about LGBT people. It might be the whole package of positions that ESR takes, not just about LGBT issues but about race, politics, &c.
I have friends with very conservative beliefs (though none, to my knowledge, have ever argued that homosexuality is inextricably bound with pederasty). But none of them have a cohesive worldview in which their own attributes just happen to define the ideal human, compared against which all nonconformant humans are inferior. ESR, on the other hand...
ESR's general observation that the ancients often saw homosexual as being about dominance is probably correct. However, the framing makes it sound like this is specific to homosexual relationships. In fact ancient cultures often saw ALL male sexual relationships as being about dominance. Of course they didn't really need to spend a lot of time discussing who was being dominated in a heterosexual relationship: it was always the woman in pretty much all pre-modern civilizations.
This makes his second point about a supposed biological predisposition towards domination sex really apply to all men. If gay men are struggling with this "biological headwind" then so are straight men.
> The only value judgement made therein is that (assuming the information used to reach this conclusion is correct) that historically, homosexuality been associated with some pretty ugly and downright evil things.
> If they're not correct, then this amounts to a very, very disgusting and ugly smear piece worthy of groups like the infamous Westboro church.
> So now I wonder.. which is it?
Well, that's tricky. Most of the historical associations he makes are roughly correct as stated, but what is misleading is the implicit claim that underlines the whole piece -- that equivalent historical associations don't exist to each of those for heterosexuality, which they do -- romantic heterosexuality only became a cultural norm (rather than something portrayed as exceptional, often dangerous, and very frequently as a source of deviance from cultural norms relating to the family) in the Western world only fairly recently historically. The "massive reinvention" of (male) homosexuality that ESR refers to is real, but its part and parcel of a broader reinvention of sexuality in general from a very similar starting point and in a very similar direction.
Because (and here I make the first and only value claim in this essay) whatever one’s opinion of homophilic homosexuals might be, the behaviors associated with the pederastic/dominating classical style are entangled with abuse and degradation in a way that can only be described as evil. Modern homosexuals deserve praise for their attempt to get shut of them.
If you disagree with the reasoning prior to that or that his facts are wrong (which is entirely possible), then yeah, he's full of shit. That said, he does compliment "modern homosexuals" in contrast to what he claims came before.
It's uncomfortable reading, but I don't exactly see him advocating dragging anyone behind a truck.
What you're quoting is a trope whose malignancy might be more obvious in a racial context: "The good black people deserve praise for their attempt to get shut of them".
Not only does he compare them, he contrasts that societal relationship over time. Doing so doesn't make him a degenerate. A windbag, sure, or a liar, but degenerate is a particular term.
Do you disagree with his premises or his facts, or just his conclusions?
For example, I think he's wrong because he doesn't cite sources for his assertions about the demographics of various types of porn or sources for his claims of historical homosexuality/pedophilia. But that's a straight matter of "Where did you get this idea from?".
You know, the world does not consists of two opposing positions, like republicans or democrats. There could actually be other positions than those two you pointed out. One for example that this is Hacker News and not Huffington Post.
Your comment about "support him by using his software" is just silly.
Lots of creators in this world have had less than flattering opinions in different topics, but does not take away what they produced.
I can still enjoy Wagner regardless of his views on the jews. I don't have to reformat all my ReiserFS based hard drives after Reiser murdered his wife. And The Pianist by Roman Polanski is an absolute masterpiece, even though Polanski raped that poor girl.
So I evaluate SRC based on merits, not the creators.
In general, I agree. The question is whether you're helping promote the "bad parts" by promoting the good ones. I mean, why are we reading and discussing ERS's views on Catholic priests if not because many people like his software?
But by your definition you are already promoting other peoples opinions by using their stuff. It is unavoidable.
The only difference is that you don't care about those opinions because either you don't know about them or you don't think it is important. But they still exist.
People can have different political, religious, etc. views than you, but why should that influence whether you use his software or not?
Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it?
What if those views (or your own) change over time and you disagree with them?
(ESR aside) Why not? If I believe that someone's exposed views are harmful, doesn't it make sense to avoid increasing his/her overall influence?
I mean, the fact that we're discussing ESR's views on pedophilia shows that his influence in an unrelated area (software) increases the exposure of those views. If he was just a nobody like me, would we be discussing his blog post on Catholic priests? Not likely.
Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it?
I sure don't, but why does that mean one should actively ignore gained knowledge?
Maybe we respond more to the milieu of a comment more than its actual content. Personally I like conspiracy theories about topical things. I never believe them but they make me chuckle to see the world from a weird point of view. But some people are going to find such theories to be horribly offensive (like Buzz Aldrin about moon fakery). We all have the capacity to wrongly analyse something we don't understand and have no stake in. A lot of people don't know what it is like to be attracted to their own gender and come out with things that are not just offensive but blatantly silly. The rest of us no better.
First of all it would take too much time to find out all the authors of all the software that I routinely use, and then keep up with what their current views are on various topics.
But I think the main reason is that most software has more than one author, and it would be unfair to judge the usefulness of that software based on the (non-technical) views of just one of its authors.
Your reasoning would apply only for single-author software, and TBH I would consider those pet-projects anyway, and I don't think the original author would care much whether you use it or not.
Edit: about gained knowledge:
I think you could apply this if you compare multiple competing solutions, one deciding factor could be the author's thoughts on various topics.
Just like how a company's attitude towards various topics might be influencing your purchasing decision: for example
Nvidia doesn't support open-source drivers, hence I don't buy Nvidia when choosing a graphics card.
But again for me those are all technical reasons, I wouldn't factor an author's/company's political views into that decision, unless it was something really horrible.
Your reasoning would apply only for single-author software
But doesn't that fit SRC itself?
But again for me those are all technical reasons, I wouldn't factor an author's/company's political views into that decision, unless it was something really horrible.
Ah! But then you're not arguing whether it makes sense to factor the political views in the decision - what you're actually arguing is that ESR's views are not really horrible.
But since pothibo supposedly considers them really horrible, it makes sense that (s)he would factor in those views, no?
Maybe, although I don't think I made technical decisions based on unrelated events.
The closest that comes to mind is as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602582
I did use ReiserFS in the past, and I did switch to something else but the reason was purely technical: XFS became quite good on a HDD, an ext4 very nice on an SSD, and also there didn't seem to be much development done upstream once the original author was gone.
Why not respond to bigotry with love, instead of hating back? This is not some zero-sum game. If anyone needs a little bit of success in life, it's a bigot.
This is not some mundane left wing vs right wing discussion. It's a guy who believes that homosexuals should be taken on the same level as pedophiles. The line between saying this and saying homosexuals should go to prison is thin at best.
Maybe people are downvoting you because you're showing an incapability to distinguish between someone's expressed beliefs and their personal character?
