Whenever I watch one of Terry's videos, I get highly motivated to program. Not read a blog post comparing frameworks, or a debate about some programming idiom, or even designing some larger project. But literally type stuff into a computer and make things appear on the screen. It is remarkable how watching his TempleOS videos uncovers the fascination I had of computers from my youth, 30 years ago.
Well well now i am curious. That was what drew me towards Linux back in the day as i felt Windows was getting more and more convoluted and opaque. And these days the feeling is rising in me again as i watch what is being introduced above the kernel on almost a daily basis.
One should probably add a trigger warning. He is schizophrenic and not quite himself at times, especially in the comments. Not to take away from his technical feats.
I think it's worth being specific here -- he uses the word "nigger" frequently and regularly makes other nasty comments about black people and other minorities.
When I've seen his website in the past, the crazy religious stuff has always been there, which I can look past, but now it seems like the crazy racist stuff is way way more prominent, which I just cannot.
Completely agreed. I understand that he's mentally ill, and I wish him all the best in that regard. But I can't help but see him as just another racist hick. Super cool project he has, but I want nothing to do with him or anything he works on.
He is a racist hick, who happens to be ill. If that's "another" thing, then so be it. Don't really care which came first. I will not let racists duck undercover of his illness. I stop short of being genuinely upset at him, but hate speech is hate speech. Since he has a large-ish audience, his ideas are becoming part of culture. Agree with him or defend him or apologize for his racism all you wish -- you are kinda/sorta part of the problem.
What an absolutely absurd opinion. I really don't think you appreciate the manifestation of schizophrenia. Would you feel the same about someone suffering from Tourette's for swearing in front of a child?
The guy believes lots of crazy things: men in suits are after him, aliens put things in his body, that he has conversations with god about music, etc. He translates random number generators into ASCII attempting to divine messages from god. He writes long-winded nonsensical rants jumping from detailed technical dissertations to rambling about old war movies. Schizophrenia literally means "split mind" -- ideas, concepts, hallucinations attack his brain and he has no basis for dispelling which are grounded in reality and which are not. It's the biological equivalent of radio interference or a loose wire.
A large chunk of the things he writes are unintelligible. Yes, people focus on his work, because it's pretty amazing that somebody suffering so profoundly from an illness can do such interesting (and esoteric) work. The fact that a subset of his schizophrenic attacks include racist language is something I feel sad, not angry about.
Yeah, the sadness really shows. I wish I could share your clinical detachment. I guess I'm too PC (as someone else implied) or ignorant of mental illness (as you implied). Let's agree to disagree about our opinion of Owens. He's a deranged and schizophrenic genius, I get it. We can agree that he's brilliant and is producing something really cool.
I'm not bothered by his racism -- it's too common for me to be really upset by it. What bothers me is how you and others are so quick to point out how cool TempleOS is, and how smart he is, and how his hate speech is OK because he's ill. You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he says, which is telling. Enjoy his streams, hell -- make TempleOS your default OS and mail all of your friends/family a copy of it.
Just consider that white males happen to make up the vast majority of his audience. Blacks and whoever else he hates will have a harder time than you do sympathizing with his hateful speech, schizophrenic or not. Again, Hitler was a schizophrenic but that doesn't make his hateful rhetoric OK does it? Oh wait, Mein Kampf was recently a bestseller in Germany and we have a former Breitbart editor in the White House. Touché.
"You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he says, which is telling."
It's very telling. When someone does something out of mental illness, there is no reasoning them to change their course. When someone does it out of bigotry, there is.
Wait, who is Owens? Terry Davis is the creator of TempleOS. Please read some of the writing on http://templeos.org and tell me that's anything comparable to Mean Kampf. He's not writing political rhetoric, it's quite literally the ramblings of a mentally ill person.
Calling him a "racist hick" makes several claims. One is that he is a racist. Another is that he is a poorly-educated rural dweller. These are frequently paired because some people think that rural dwellers or the poorly educated or Southerners or whatever are all racist (sure, there's a correlation).
Being schizophrenic is a serious problem, and his technical achievements in the face of them are notable. But it's not a free pass for everything. We can distinguish, for example, between people with mental health problems who are danger to themself and others and those who are not.
It's one thing entirely to rail about aliens, because aliens aren't real. It's another use racial invective and epithets against racial and cultural minorities, because Jews and black people are absolutely real.
If you are a mental outlier, the village can agree on torching the next time, somebody must be put on a stake- it might be a good survival strategy, to vent the anger towards a minorities group that is not you. In particular, if you are all ready paranoid anyway, meaning, you basically have a conspiracy theory for anyone you meet.
That was a very vague and meandering allegory, but I think I hear what you're saying. I'm not gonna respond to it, but if you wish to call me a paranoid witch-hunter please just go ahead and do so next time.
Put yourself in the shoes of a jew or black person and watch some of his streams. Then revisit the comments for this story and how they all gush over his unique cool project and wave away his vehement racism as just an unfortunate detail.
Go a little bit further from the curated and (somewhat) tolerant atmosphere of HN, and you'll see Owens' hateful speech being parroted, and being used to legitimatize the promulgation of the already massive undercurrent of racism that lurks in almost every corner of Internet culture.
I hate to confirm Godwin's law, but -- Hitler was also schizophrenic. Seeing an obviously ill person suffer from disease is sad, but it's even sadder to see the social disease of racism so ubiquitous and widely tolerated.
And just in case you really do think I'm "looking for" examples of racism --just last night I joined an IRC channel about my city (DC) to meet people. I had to leave because I heard "nigger" and "brown people get out" one too many times for comfort.
At first i thought that was a bit of an exaggeration, but after listening to him talk in his "What God Wants in Music" video, that is actually a reasonable request to make. He very casually and without warning declares things that might easily make traumatized people relive things.
Clicked a recent video and he rants about random numbers, the lottery and the "whitest of the white scientists of the National Institute of Standards" with a few colorful "monkey niggers" thrown in. ..... uh Okay? Is that guy crazy? In the comments people say he has a 90 day youtube ban.
Yes he is. TempleOs is his literal third temple of god. He is a very skilled guy though. Own operating system, own programming language, own terminal, made first person shooter and flight simulator from scratch.
Just to show you what a skilled guy in different mindset can do.
