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Comic eric raymond esr job job offer linus linus torvalds microsoft richard stallman rms

Microsoft job offer

episode 17 strip

Do tribes have the equivalent of a villiage idiot? Pissing on graves, sheesh; I’m choking on clichés here.

Geek celebrity update: Jon ‘maddog’ Hall commented on the Linus(r) post.

I’m caving in to pressure and am planning to introduce some new characters. I need new bodies to do this. This is where you, and the power of creative commons/free culture, comes in. If you have a digital camera, an example of typical geeky attire, and a hilarious human body then you can help. Dress in the aforementioned attire, have a friend take a few photos of you posing in typical comic-strip stances, send photos to lovesraymond@gmail.com (only send photos here. fan/hate mail should always go to eler@geekz.co.uk.

You agree to license your photos under a Creative Commons Attribution License so I can use them quite freely. Ensure you are very well lit; try outside in daylight. Try to get the white balance set right. Try to stand in front of a plain uniform background, or at least one in clear contrast to your clothing. The rest is up to you.

36 replies on “Microsoft job offer”

Calling his remarks “White Supremicist” is an understandable misreading of his statements. I think he’s stating the science case as being stronger than it actually is, but I don’t think that lumping him in with the white supremacy crowd in unwarranted.

But, of course, you’re free to say whatever you like, and I’m certainly not aiming to stop you.

Also, Eric Raymond is a presumptuous egotist with an overly high opinion of himself, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. :-)

esr is the Steve Ballmer of the open source world. Heh he removed my post from his blog, probably because I referred to him as a reject for the south park retard role – timmehhhh! maybe that and all the swearing at his gun-nut racism and pro-americanism. being small, ugly, white, self-important and widely read often gives otherwise useless genetic throwbacks like esr a false sense of intelligence and self-worth. ignorance is bliss: http://www.lingsoft.fi/~reriksso/competence.html

Eric Hopper: I am of course talking of white supremacy as a literal term, not as a particular group or movement. His interpretation of the “science” is that, on average, white people are better than black people. Sounds like supremacy to me. He’s never discussed cross burning or natty white hoods anywhere that I’ve seen.

By Post Author

Eric Raymond is obviously a racist; much like anyone arguing with “women on average have smaller brains” is a sexist.

Reading his pamphlets it becomes pretty clear that he is both a racist and a sexist.

In other words, Eric Raymond would normally end up as the kind of fat guy sitting in a dirty t-shirt in a trailorpark home, gun in his lap, yelling: “Bring me my beer, black bimbo!”

Unfortunately some people — Bruce Perens took a lot of that blame for himself — declared him worthy of attention.

Now all of us pay the price for that.

“That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.”

Ha! Given the name of his blog, and his notorious past, this is just indescribably funny. You need to work this into your strip!

How often does the “science” in the Bell Curve have to be utterly destroyed before people ignore it as the useless tripe that it is?

Oh. Never, eh?

Damn.

Much as I think Raymond is a dick, reporting scientific studies that show IQ is to some extent correlated with race != racism. It would be amazing if there wasn’t any link if you think about it. His interpretations are suspect however; for example this comment — “U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population?” — is complete speculation. It a little disturbing that he leaps on the IQ argument rather than other possible factors such as poverty.

If you want to take the piss out of Raymond’s blog entries, there are lots of better candidates though. How about his apology for fascist Spain?

He’s completely wrong about the Bell Curve, its trashing was thorough and well-deserved. I can only assume that his other racist sources are bogus, but I’m really too lazy to read through his drivel and try to figure it out. It smells like crap, for sure, but I guess he’d tell me that’s just the extra zinc in his hair, which he never washes.

Re: Rich Smith

His fascist fantasies come as no surprise to a European: ESRs particular political branch of U.S. gun-toting libertarianism is considered extreme right wing, even fascist in Europe. For a reason, I believe. ESRs racism, sexism and relatively clumsy attempts at giving his political statements a scientific appearance remind me of the way the creationists try to “rationalise” against evolution.

Quite plainly: ESR is the last person I would want anywhere near my life, family or children.

Just to shift topics a bit: Microsoft never offered ESR a job. Some Microsoft recruiter was passed ESR’s name
and asked ESR if he was interested in interviewing. I wouldn’t be surprised if that recruiter had no idea
who ESR was, or if someone passed the name along as a joke. Hell, maybe ESR did; after all, he hasn’t
gotten much press lately. I wouldn’t put it past him to have a friend suggest to someone at Microsoft
that ESR might be interested in selling out, just so he could proudly post the first feeler he received
to the world.

Oh, and CTD, ESR abandoned libertarianism some time ago. The non-coercion principle simply isn’t
compatible with flogging the Iraq war and the international battle against “Islamofascism”.

ESR’s knowledge of history is apparently limited to the computing age. It would be an eye opener for Mr ESR if these so called ‘scientific IQ studies’ were conducted during the dark ages when the white race was busy with witch hunting and the Muslim world was not only laying down the basic foundations of science and mathematics, but also adhering to Islam much more fundamentally than any group of Muslims in these times.

Even today, if we look at the Indian/Pakistani ethnic group in the UK, they occupy similar status as the blacks in the US. However the same group is generally regarded as highly educated and intelligent in the US.
This shows that IQ has nothing to do with ethnicity and is likely correlated to economic factors. However, as ESR so aptly demonstrates, one can grow up in an intellectually stimulating enviroment and have access to the best educational and economic resources and still turn out to be an idiot.

The cartoon is very enjoyable but I am starting to feel that ESR is too easy a target. How about bringing in some Microsoft and Sun executives and/or computer science luminaries? Theo de Raadt, Don Knuth come to mind but there is more (appropriate) gold to be mined. Perhaps it would require bending the original house-mates setup. I’d be happy for Linus and Richard to kick Raymond out of the house, it would create a whole new mystery to the title of the cartoon. Anyway, looking forward to more!

women on avergae indeed have smaller brains, but that’s because women are on avergae smaller in size than men.

Re CTD:

As a native German who once read “Mein Kampf” and has had the usual education on the subject (people here cannot go through school without having that subject multiple times to make sure we don’t fall for it again) much of ESRs superficial “survival of the fittest” and “life and death” rhethorics sounds awfully familiar to the things that the fascist used to justify their atrocities.

So yes, if he were living in Germany, ESR would probably be considered to be somewhere in the “brown spectrum” — the color associated with fascism. The German conservative party has expelled people for much more harmless statements than those of ESR for them being considered outright fascist.

I’m starting to feel sorry for ESR. Imagine having so many complete strangers online dissing you.
I would be interested to know which coping mechanism ESR applies. I guess being able to stroke
a collection of guns must be comforting. But living in England I would’nt know as they are ilegal
here :-(

ESR has not acheived much apart from Fetchmail and the odd book, so why is he getting to much
attention. It’s easy to attack Gates. He’s the richest man in the world and makes the worst OS
in the world.

I’m just a humble Open Source Perl Developer who wants to write good software and earn respect
for it. ESR you did people like me no favours with your infantile behavior.

Thanks,

Martin

What I find really strange is that ESR does not seem to know the difference between correlation and causality.

Maybe he spent too much time polishing his guns and not enough in math class?

This comic strip is incredibly valuable because it pricks the pomposity of geeks. It’s practically the only thing I know to do this. Lots of blogs are critical of geeks. Lots of blogs are sarcastic about geeks. But few show geeks to be the overinflated windbags that they usually are. The comments within Slashdot provide ample proof – 100,000,000 geeks who all think that they know more than everybody else!

Open source is founded upon people thinking they know better than everybody else. RMS decided he knew a better way to distribute software than anybody else. Miguel de Icaza figured he could do a better desktop environment than everybody else. Bruce Perrens reckons he can do a better office distro than everybody else.

European Perspective wrote:
“His fascist fantasies come as no surprise to a European: ESRs particular political branch of U.S. gun-toting libertarianism is considered extreme right wing, even fascist in Europe.”

I’d hardly call him fascist. He has made it clear on a number of occasions that he is vehemently anti-authoritarian. Of course that seems rather a contradiction when held up against his rampant pro-Bushism…

Either way he must not have much hacking to do if he has enough time to spare that he can waste it arguing politics on the internet.

Quote: “Even today, if we look at the Indian/Pakistani ethnic group in the UK, they occupy similar status as the blacks in the US.”

If this is meant as a sly attack on ESR for his robust, and entirely reasonable, attitude towards Islamic terrorism it is a failure. The attempt to bracket together Indians and Pakistanis and pretend that there is some “racial” objection by native Britons to persons from the subcontinent is dishonest and reflects nothing in reality. For the truth is that Sikhs and Hindus are notably successful in British society. However, Muslims do not integrate as well into British, or indeed any other non-Muslim societies, and (believe it or not) the problem is _not_ with everyone else. Moreover, the problem here is not “racial” but cultural. Some reading needed here, I think:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_when_islam.html

Thanks for your great work!

In reply to Randy Sparks:
Isn’t that the driving force behind everything we humans do apart from day-to-day survival?
To think that one could do or know something better than other people?
Galileo Galilei, Sokrates, Einstein, Franklin, Jefferson .. everyone! They all thought they knew something better than other people.

Ah, very interesting. So the brownshirt who runs this site removed my attempt to demonstrate the falsity of an allegation made on it. This series is not basically about comedy. It is a hate site for denigrating and making false allegations against anyone who does not share a particular rather unpleasant political ideology. ESR’s ideology is naive: but this site’s is contemptible. It’s also an anti-liberal site site that censors any attempt to correct false allegations made on it. What a deeply unpleasant enterprise! Have fun removing this one. :-)

I think this Damian guy got upset because I don’t approve comments quickly enough.

The only comment I’ve ever not approved was just another Bruce Perens request troll. Why would I choose to censor such comedy gold?

I need a disclaimer: comments on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of the brownshirt who runs it. they probably do though.

By Post Author

ESR says: ‘stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color’.

this could explain his appassionate defense of guns?

I feel I should point out that, politically, ESR is a libertarian. His main interest is complete freedom. But he has a number of unfortunate prejudices.

In reply to Emil Beinroth, no, making things better isn’t the drive behind the average person. Most people have to be really under durress or seriously uncomfortable before they fix or change something. Revolutions don’t start because the workers can’t receive all the channels on their TV. Revolutions start because the workers are unbearably repressed.

Geeks, on the other hand, must have everything just right. We must make everything better. If something isn’t good enough, we’ll make it better.

The problem is that we’re also arrogant. What your standard geek believes is correct and everybody else is plain wrong. This is why there are hundreds of Linux distros, for example.

The beauty of open source is that it brings such projects to the surface and also encourages collaborative working. This is why geeks + open source is a match made in heaven.

But geekdom isn’t perfect and this is what I think this comic strip has latched onto. Geeks are flawed in loads of annoying ways – even the good ones like Linus and RMS.

Sorry, what white supremacist? The fact that IQ differs racially is a fact. And does me pointing out the fact that Asian people have a generally higher IQ that white people make me a.. Mongoloid supremacist?

In the name of Druids everywhere, I take back brown in the name of FASHION!!

:Dust mite [to another]- So it’s said they believe a linguistically sensible moral being inhabits the entire area around a tree? Bloody suggestible, innit?
:Dust mite 2- Eh? I think I got NAT working so I can torrent Bruce Perens’ consciousness now. What about moral consistency; does that mean that the VM has a sort of lag to it, or that the sense of immediacy to needs is orthogonal to decisions along one’s mores?
:Dust mite- Well yes, as far as steadiness–what if I want port 7435 at odd strikes of the hour?–and yes, up to the cut-and-run-for-your-lives point.
:Dust mite 2- How long might we live, as mites? A cartoonist might utilize our host tree?
:Dust mite- Long enough to brood over the galleys without buying more webhosting, daresay.

I feel compelled to point out that an assertion of superiority may be a necessary condition of supremacism but it is not sufficient. I don’t know Eric’s position on race relations but, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I assume he’s still libertarian enough to say “we’re better than they are but they have the same rights.”

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