Rational yet Irrational. Part 1 – Eric S Raymond

I don’t think we’ve ever blogged a link to madman Eric S Raymond’s Armed and Dangerous blog – so drink up, it’s bonkers stuff. Eric was the author of the famous The Cathedral and the Bazaar open-source polemic, and is by many accounts an intelligent human being. Fortunately for the vanity of lesser mortals, his intelligence has very tight limits, and rarely extends to anything that anyone else would be interested in. As NTK put it (ages ago) “[he] uses logic and free thought to reach the same certainties that sixteen pints of ‘Ayn’s Old Prejudicial’ and a roomful of cab drivers might manage in an evening”.

Highlights of the current blog: “If Kerry is elected, the terrorists will have won” (some Democrats REALLY seem to hate Republicans, WTF!). And “Liberals are fools, [but] Republicans are villains”. The main-stream media IS left-wing of course. Also he solves the problem of Free Will (via the usual crass red-herrings and a startlingly un-novel approach that he somehow managed to miss in all the literature).

There’s something in the way he constructs sentences, even when they make sense, that makes me picture him gazing into nothing with little fires dancing at the back of his eyes. Dangerous indeed.