I think the main reason some people have strong opinions about ESR is that he has some strong opinions, some of which are highly controversial, and he states some of those controversial opinions openly. In particular, much in US politics is super-divisive, and in five minutes on Eric’s blog you can readily find five things that some (otherwise?) reasonable people will get very angry about.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying anything about whether it is right or reasonable to get angry about any or all of those things. Only that, given their existence, it should not be a surprise that some people have strong feelings. Also for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think arguments about Eric’s opinions about guns or communism or whatever have any place here on LW and I hope everyone will completely ignore those opinions when reading the present article.
(There are probably also people who have strong opinions about his strong opinions on, say, the things sometimes called “free software” and “open source software”, or about the quality of the software he’s written, or other things in that general vicinity. But I don’t think those are what people who get angry about ESR mostly get angry about.)
[EDITED to add:] Well, as I warned, “error is always possible”, and indeed one of my paraphrases makes what Eric wrote sound more inflammatory than what he actually wrote was. My apologies for that. Specifically: I said he said “white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will”. He actually said specifically “rioters”. As it happens, someone in the ensuing discussion asked him to clarify the distinction, and this is what he said: “A protester holds up a sign and yells a slogan. A rioter intends to commit crime against persons or property, and expresses that intent in behavior; e.g. persons equipped with incendiaries or street weapons are rioters, not protesters.” So, not literally all white people at BLM protests, but any white person who “intends to commit crime against persons or property”, which may be judged e.g. by what the person is equipped with rather than by actions already committed.
Woah, at least one of those summaries seems really quite inaccurate. Bad enough that like, I feel like I should step in as a moderator and be like “wait, this doesn’t seem OK”.
I am not very familiar with ESR’s opinions, but your summary of “white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will” is really misrepresenting the thing he actually said. What he actually said was “White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be Antifa Communists attempting to manipulate this tragedy for Communist political ends;”, with the key difference being “white rioters” instead of “white people”. While there is still plenty to criticize in that sentence, this seems like a really crucial distinction that makes that sentence drastically less bad.
Topics like this tend to get really politicized and emotional, which I think means it’s reasonable to apply some extra scrutiny and care to not misrepresent what other people said, and generally err on the side of quoting verbatim (ideally while giving substantial additional context).
Yeah, “rioters” would have been more accurate than “people”, though I don’t know exactly what Eric considers the boundary between protesting and rioting. My apologies. As I said, mistakes get made when doing things quickly, and doing it quickly was much of the point.
[EDITED to add:] I have edited my original comment to point out the mistake; I also found a comment from Eric on the original blogpost that clarifies where he draws the line between “rioters” and mere protestors, and have quoted that there too.
Looking at voting patterns in this subthread, I have the impression that readers generally have the impression that I’m attempting to mount some sort of attack on Eric. Obviously I can’t prove anything about my intentions here, but I promise that that was not in any way my purpose; I was answering Zian’s puzzlement about how ESR could possibly be controversial by pointing out some controversial things. I don’t think Eric would disagree with my identification of those things as things some people might get angry about.
If my purpose had been an unscrupulous political attack, I wouldn’t have provided links to let everyone check whether my brief summaries were accurate, and I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to point out that I might have made errors and explain why they were particularly likely in this instance.
(I don’t object to being downvoted; if you think something I write is of low quality then you should downvote it. But it looks to me as if some wrong assumptions may be being made about my motives here.)
[EDITED to add:] Things look more “normal” now; dunno whether that means that the earlier state was some sort of statistical anomaly, or that some people read the above and agreed, or what. I mention this just in case anyone’s reading this and wonders why in this comment I’m expressing concern about something that’s not there :-).
I would expect the bar to be pretty clear and as habryka said “intent to commit crimes against persons or property”. I would expect Eric to have the bar somewhere where he thinks that the law that allows private citizens to use force to prevent crimes from happening would protect him.
As you’ll see from the edit to my original comment, I found something Eric said in the discussion on his blog that drew a fairly explicit boundary between rioters and mere protestors. My impression is that if Eric actually acts strictly according to the principles stated there, the law will not protect him and he will end up in jail (thinking that someone has intent to commit crimes is not generally sufficient justification in law for shooting them); several commenters on his blog expressed the same concern.
I worry that we may be getting into arguing about Eric’s opinions themselves, rather than merely answering the question “why do some people have such strong opinions about him”, and I think that’s not a useful topic for discussion here. Of course that’s mostly my fault for not getting my summaries perfectly accurate, for which once again I apologize.
3
My knowledge before reading the article and comments could be summarized as :
These are some really great articles by ESR. I wonder why no one had taken them super seriously yet...
somewhat of an outsider perspective as FeepingCreature described
I wonder why some people have such strong opinions about this person
I think the main reason some people have strong opinions about ESR is that he has some strong opinions, some of which are highly controversial, and he states some of those controversial opinions openly. In particular, much in US politics is super-divisive, and in five minutes on Eric’s blog you can readily find five things that some (otherwise?) reasonable people will get very angry about.
… I thought I should actually test that, so I went over to have a look. His blog has been a bit less political lately than at some other times. But in exactly five minutes I found the following assertions (all the following are my paraphrases; I have no intent to distort but error is always possible, especially when reading quickly, so if you are minded to be angry at Eric you should first go and check what he actually wrote): the US has a problem with Communist oppression, Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero, white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will [EDITED to add: as habryka points out in a reply, this paraphrase is potentially misleading; more below], an armed storming of the Michigan State House was an appropriate response to stay-at-home orders. (That’s April 2020, not the thing a few months later where they tried to kidnap the Governor.) Plus this ceremony for gun users, which doesn’t make any particular assertions but I bet some people will find enraging.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying anything about whether it is right or reasonable to get angry about any or all of those things. Only that, given their existence, it should not be a surprise that some people have strong feelings. Also for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think arguments about Eric’s opinions about guns or communism or whatever have any place here on LW and I hope everyone will completely ignore those opinions when reading the present article.
(There are probably also people who have strong opinions about his strong opinions on, say, the things sometimes called “free software” and “open source software”, or about the quality of the software he’s written, or other things in that general vicinity. But I don’t think those are what people who get angry about ESR mostly get angry about.)
[EDITED to add:] Well, as I warned, “error is always possible”, and indeed one of my paraphrases makes what Eric wrote sound more inflammatory than what he actually wrote was. My apologies for that. Specifically: I said he said “white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will”. He actually said specifically “rioters”. As it happens, someone in the ensuing discussion asked him to clarify the distinction, and this is what he said: “A protester holds up a sign and yells a slogan. A rioter intends to commit crime against persons or property, and expresses that intent in behavior; e.g. persons equipped with incendiaries or street weapons are rioters, not protesters.” So, not literally all white people at BLM protests, but any white person who “intends to commit crime against persons or property”, which may be judged e.g. by what the person is equipped with rather than by actions already committed.
Woah, at least one of those summaries seems really quite inaccurate. Bad enough that like, I feel like I should step in as a moderator and be like “wait, this doesn’t seem OK”.
I am not very familiar with ESR’s opinions, but your summary of “white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will” is really misrepresenting the thing he actually said. What he actually said was “White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be Antifa Communists attempting to manipulate this tragedy for Communist political ends;”, with the key difference being “white rioters” instead of “white people”. While there is still plenty to criticize in that sentence, this seems like a really crucial distinction that makes that sentence drastically less bad.
Topics like this tend to get really politicized and emotional, which I think means it’s reasonable to apply some extra scrutiny and care to not misrepresent what other people said, and generally err on the side of quoting verbatim (ideally while giving substantial additional context).
Yeah, “rioters” would have been more accurate than “people”, though I don’t know exactly what Eric considers the boundary between protesting and rioting. My apologies. As I said, mistakes get made when doing things quickly, and doing it quickly was much of the point.
[EDITED to add:] I have edited my original comment to point out the mistake; I also found a comment from Eric on the original blogpost that clarifies where he draws the line between “rioters” and mere protestors, and have quoted that there too.
Looking at voting patterns in this subthread, I have the impression that readers generally have the impression that I’m attempting to mount some sort of attack on Eric. Obviously I can’t prove anything about my intentions here, but I promise that that was not in any way my purpose; I was answering Zian’s puzzlement about how ESR could possibly be controversial by pointing out some controversial things. I don’t think Eric would disagree with my identification of those things as things some people might get angry about.
If my purpose had been an unscrupulous political attack, I wouldn’t have provided links to let everyone check whether my brief summaries were accurate, and I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to point out that I might have made errors and explain why they were particularly likely in this instance.
(I don’t object to being downvoted; if you think something I write is of low quality then you should downvote it. But it looks to me as if some wrong assumptions may be being made about my motives here.)
[EDITED to add:] Things look more “normal” now; dunno whether that means that the earlier state was some sort of statistical anomaly, or that some people read the above and agreed, or what. I mention this just in case anyone’s reading this and wonders why in this comment I’m expressing concern about something that’s not there :-).
I would expect the bar to be pretty clear and as habryka said “intent to commit crimes against persons or property”. I would expect Eric to have the bar somewhere where he thinks that the law that allows private citizens to use force to prevent crimes from happening would protect him.
As you’ll see from the edit to my original comment, I found something Eric said in the discussion on his blog that drew a fairly explicit boundary between rioters and mere protestors. My impression is that if Eric actually acts strictly according to the principles stated there, the law will not protect him and he will end up in jail (thinking that someone has intent to commit crimes is not generally sufficient justification in law for shooting them); several commenters on his blog expressed the same concern.
I worry that we may be getting into arguing about Eric’s opinions themselves, rather than merely answering the question “why do some people have such strong opinions about him”, and I think that’s not a useful topic for discussion here. Of course that’s mostly my fault for not getting my summaries perfectly accurate, for which once again I apologize.