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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from libertarianism
  • In the Trump era, all of this stuff looks positively quaint. There is no longer any question that libertarianism is usually a thin veneer over the standard Republicans, which is in turn a thin veneer over outright fascism. Eric Raymond has gone full fash to nobody's surprise. Libertarianism is just fascism for nerds, and always has been.
from libertarianism
  • I used to spend a good deal of time arguing with libertarians on the internet. For instance, I spent a whole summer in a flaming discussion with Eric Raymond , the canonical internet libertarian blowhard, on the long-defunct anarchy-list email group. I suppose I got something out of this. At minimum, it gave me some practice investigating my own beliefs and the reasoning and emotions behind them. There's also plenty of that sort of thing at my old blog.
from Kafkatrap
  • I made up this term to mean something like "trapped in oppressive mental constructs". At the time I thought maybe it was already in use, from vgr or someone like that? But alas, no, the true inventor is the execrable Eric Raymond and it seems to refer specifically to a move in the wokeness wars. Blah. I meant something more akin to the patterns found in RD Laing's book Knots, these are traps we construct for ourselves for the most part.

Eric Raymond

03 Nov 2026 - 04 Nov 2026
Open in Logseq
    • In ancient days (like the 1980s) I would argue with him on anarchy-list.

    • Anarcho-fascism

      • Raymond is a self-proclaimed anarchist who celebrates the use of state power to torture and murder people whose opinion he doesn't like. At least he's quite open about it:
      • On being against torture | Armed and Dangerous
        • This anarchist is defending state torture; I argued with him (as goddinpotty, a nym I use sometimes):
          • Who do you think Orwell would conisder more Orwellian: the ACLU (who have not in fact redefined torture; your only objection is that they mention it in the same breath as lesser forms of abuse), or the Bush administration who coined the term “enhanced interrogation” for practices that are, to anybody with an ounce of intellectual integrity, clearly torture?
          • For a supposed anarchist, you sure seem like you are auditioning for a job in the security apparatus, or rather the network of apologists for it. The only purpose of your text is to try to redefine torture so as to allow practices that have been clearly condemned as torture by people who actually know what they are talking about, such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, extreme cold, etc. People who know what they are talking about include the International Committee of the Red Cross, charged with enforcing the Geneva conventions. Here’s the start and end of their 2006 report on Guantanamo (from an article by Mark Danner, well worth reading):
      • Here he clearly identifies with the agents of the state who murdered Renee Good
        • He's really this cartoon come to life (by Matt Bors)

    • On the Jewish question

      • Here is is lecturing Jews on not knowing their own self-interests (because they tend to the left)
        • This jackoff who fantasizes about armed resistance to the state is apparently unaware that the most effective Jewish armed resistence to the Nazis was organized by Communists.
            • Ask Claude
              • The historical record strongly backs up your point. Here's the breakdown:
              • **The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the most iconic example of Jewish armed resistance):**
              • The formation of the ŻOB (Jewish Combat Organization) represented an unusual political alliance within prewar Polish Jewish politics, bringing together socialist-Zionist youth movements, Labor Zionist groups, Communists, and the Jewish Labour Bund.
              • Its commander, Mordechai Anielewicz, joined a left-wing Zionist group after completing high school.
              • The ZOB was fundamentally a coalition of the Jewish left.
              • **The Minsk Ghetto — arguably the most effective Jewish armed resistance of the war:**
              • The Minsk ghetto's Communist-led resistance movement, through its links to its Belarusian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans.
              • At its height, the Minsk ghetto had a population of about 100,000 Jews. Roughly 10,000 of them reached the forests; of those who did, most survived the war.
              • That's a survival rate that dwarfs any other ghetto resistance.
              • The Minsk underground was a vehicle for cooperation between Jewish and Byelorussian resistance. Because the underground was organized and led by Communists and governed by Communist ideology, joint resistance and mutual assistance were taken for granted.
              • Western Europe:
              • With the exception of the Jewish Communists, whose operating orders came from Moscow and whose brave resistance actions were directed primarily against German targets, most of the Jewish groups in the Resistance acted to secure Jewish goals.
              • In 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Communist underground groups in Germany, France, and Belgium launched resistance efforts. Many Jews were involved in the Partisan Army, an armed resistance group organised by the Communist Party, and the Front de l'Indépendance, a Communist Party-affiliated group, which organised false papers and rescues, gathered intelligence, and had armed sections. Almost all members of the group were Jewish.
              • So the irony is thick: the person lecturing Jews about their political self-interest is apparently unaware that when Jewish people actually did take up arms against the Nazis, it was overwhelmingly organized by people on the left — Communists, socialist-Zionists, and labor bundists — not the right. The most effective ghetto resistance in terms of lives saved was explicitly Communist-led.

    • Never go full racist

        • "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"
        • The part of me that was once an idealistic anti-racist liberal marching for civil rights died its final death last night as I watched the video of Irina Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail, being fatally stabbed in the throat from behind by a black savage I refuse to name.
        • What has finally broken me is, incidents like that aren't even a surprise anymore. The frequency of brutal, senseless murders by "African-Americans", both individually and in predatory mobs, has risen exactly as rapidly as social and coercive controls on their behavior have weakened.
        • Meanwhile, for anybody who's wondering, American whites still have about the same crime rate as Switzerland. ... was the whole ugly apparatus of racial repression - segregation, sundown towns, lynchings - really just senseless hatred? Or was it a rational containment strategy evolved under pressure from living alongside a large, visually distinct population of low-IQ savages?
    • Being anti-antifa makes you fascist, sorry. That sounds glib but if you are slobbering over Palantir that's what you are.
        • I think that it's likely the Feds will designate Antifa a foreign terrorist organization, zeroing in on Chinese Communist funding of some Antifa chapters. This will allow the direct use of the CIA, which is normally heavily restricted from operations on American soil.
        • Nothing Antifa itself can do as an organization will be able to prevent or deflect a massive multi-agency investigation. It is very likely that Palantir already has their core membership identified and their communications channels mapped. Fusion centers will be capturing an unknown but probably large percentage of Antifa message traffic.

    • Deplatformed?

      • Raymond's racism and celebration of violence would seem to be enough to get him banned from most software communities with any minimal code of conduct. Has this happened?er
      • [note: I have very mixed feelings about deplatforming – I used to be more of a free speech absolutist but that has changed over the years]
        • Ask Claude
          • Yes, this has happened — most notably at the organization he co-founded.
          • Banned from the OSI
          • Eric S. Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative and its president for the first six years, was banned from two OSI mailing lists following messages whose tone violated the code of conduct.
          • The ban came in early 2020.
          • Raymond had posted to an OSI mailing list with the title "A wild co-founder appears," announcing his return after twenty years of staying off the list.
          • What followed were several posts over the next two days on topics relating to open source licensing, after which an OSI board member posted a notice that a subscriber had been removed from both the License-Review and License-Discuss mailing lists for repeatedly violating the Code of Conduct.
          • One absolute sticking point in the OSI's code of conduct is that you must not make threatening, disparaging, or belittling remarks about another person — and this is what appears to have led to Raymond being disbarred from posting.
          • One of his emails that is widely cited as a likely trigger described the originator of an ethical source license proposal as "a toxic loonytoon who believes 'show me the code' meritocracy is at best outmoded and in general a sinister supremacist plot by straight white cisgender" men.
          • In early March 2020, he was removed from two Open Source Initiative mailing lists due to posts that violated the OSI's Code of Conduct. Raymond himself said, "They never told me specifically which message was the cause."
          • Broader Ostracism
          • In recent years, Raymond has been ostracized from the open source community due, in part, to his remarks and writing about race, gender, and homosexuality.
          • A Notable Wrinkle: What He Was Banned For
          • It's worth noting that the proximate cause of the OSI ban was not explicitly his racism or gun advocacy, but rather his conduct in a licensing debate — specifically, his aggressive opposition to "ethical source" licenses.
          • The OSI cited violations of its own CoC, which Raymond's critiques directly contested by arguing that such policies prioritized non-technical ideological enforcement over merit-based contribution.
          • Raymond's own response was characteristically combative: he called for abolishing "Codes of Conduct" and "all the Orwellian doublespeak that goes with them."
          • So in short: yes, he has been deplatformed from the organization he co-founded, though the stated trigger was his rhetorical behavior in a mailing list debate rather than his broader racist or pro-violence writings — the latter of which have faced social and reputational consequences but have not, as far as the public record shows, resulted in formal bans from other specific projects.