The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)

Even if you don't agree with his (nutzo!) politics you should refrain from repeating sloppy arguments against him.

EDIT: Also, the dogwhistle thing is bullshit. ESR basically never attempts to, in my observation, hide what he's saying. I see where 'thug' has been used by others as slang, but with a lot of people, especially of intellectual background, it is closer to its original term of derision towards anti-intellectuals and folks who would use violence to suppress opposing viewpoints.

You don't have to start saying "grok" to be a hacker, or adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more.

Both the Hacker Manifesto and to a lesser extent the Jargon File also tend to perpetrate an "us vs. them" ("freaks vs. squares", "hackers vs. normies") mindset that's pretty outdated these days. You know the only people who give a shit about categories like "geeks and jocks" any more? The ones who are so tied up in their manufactured geek identity that they don't realize the jocks are also learning Python after football practice these days.

I've known him for decades, since the 80's, and while it's true he totally went off the deep end after 9/11, he has always been a vile awful person.

And remember: Eich wasn't "removed", he CHOSE to resign of his own free will -- Mozilla even begged him to stay and offered him a well paid important position! But ESR's revisionist history never mentions that.

His favorite technique is to play this game of Libertarian Chicken, where he says something that's totally racist on its face, just to bait people, and then attempts to argue that he's actually operating at a higher level and much more clever than everyone else, and is really right, but just misunderstood, because everyone else is an idiot.

Russ Nelson made a ham-fisted attempt to emulate Raymond's standard technique in his "Blacks are Lazy" posting, but it cost him his job as President of the Open Source Initiative.

But ESR threw down the gauntlet and made a full throated public defense of Russ's "Blacks are Lazy" premise, by attacking the people who wanted him removed as "fools" and "thugs" (dog whistle for the n-word).

Raymond actually wanted OSI to get into a public knock-down drag-out fight with the "social justice warriors" who wanted Nelson to resign, at whatever cost in cash, credibility, alienating minorities, and endangering the mission of the OSI. Not exactly a shining example of leadership.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la...

Note that although Russell withdrew the article, and admitted it was badly written, Eric S. Raymond is on the record as having defended it by accusing people asking Russell to step down as being "fools and thugs". Note that "thug" has been called a "dog whistle" term for "n*gger".

https://web.archive.org/web/20140126142113/http://aattp.org/...

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/New-OSI-Presi...

Eric S. Raymond wrote: “The people who knew Russ as a Quaker, a pacifist and a gentleman, and no racist, but nevertheless pressured OSI to do the responsible thing and fire him in order to avoid political damage should be equally ashamed,” Raymond said. “Abetting somebody elses witch hunt is no less disgusting than starting your own.” “Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”