He doesn't, but he does qualify as someone on the receiving end of content-free smears and libels, and 'eugenicist' is a useful term of abuse if you want to convince others that someone is a bad person.
I'm not sure that knee-jerkingly smearing him (by association) as a racist eugenicist quite disproves the point that tenure is not protection from misguided attacks.
Emil Kirkegaard? That's your example? Did you dig that out not knowing who he is, or did you post it with full knowledge of who he was, hoping HNers wouldn't actually look at who he is?
> Emil Ole William Kirkegaard is a Danish far-right eugenicist, perjurer[3] and activist for legalising child pornography. He has a wide range of crank views and is a global-warming denier, anti-feminist, ableist, anti-vegan, homophobe, Islamophobe, transphobe and has promoted white supremacy. He is most notorious and obnoxious online for his ableism and calling transgender people, liberals, feminists and pretty much anyone with left-wing political views who merely disagrees with him as "mentally ill".
> Aside from his controversial writings on eugenics and race, Kirkegaard has been involved in other activities such as publishing personal data of 70,000 OKCupid users without permission, including their sexual preferences,[10] considered by Vox to be "without a doubt one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible data releases".[11] His writings on race and intelligence[12] have caused controversy and because peer-reviewed journals refuse to publish his work, he set up the OpenPsych pseudojournals.[13] However, after this journal was discredited he now publishes pseudo-scientific race articles in the open-access Psych journal.[14][15]
[...]
> His highest qualification is a Bachelor’s in linguistics. Having dropped out of his Masters degree, instead preferring to be "self-taught in various subjects"
[...]
> Kirkegaard’s own personal blog is home to topics such as "Is miscegenation bad for your kids?" and how one could empirically verify a Jewish conspiracy
I know people are going to mad about this because tech boys loooove him but google it he's a eugenics supporter and endorses far-right race philosophers.
What his detractors claim is that he secretly believes in some variety of "scientific racism", which makes him a Bad Person. Maybe he does and maybe it does, but believing something secretly isn't spreading it.
I guess it depends on what "it" is. He has (not very often, but more than zero times: see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid..., specifically section III) said positive things about the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are on average unusually smart, perhaps as a result of evolutionary pressure arising from centuries of persecution. This isn't usually what people mean by "scientific racism", and it doesn't seem obviously very infohazardous to me. (Maybe a bit infohazardous. I can see ways in which you could start there and end up being Just Plain Racist. But I haven't seen much evidence that this is in any way common.)
It's fairly easy to a smear campaign someone that does not fit into your narative.
All you have to do is put some labels on him, take things of out context, attribute things not said or done to the said person, and pretend to debunk him.
This way you never have to make the counterargument to the argument made by that person. You just dismiss him in whole.
I don't know if that's the case here, but considering the name-calling from the start, the typical labeling (racist, homophobe, islamophobe, Nazi, RT-shill), I'd say it fits.
It matters, and is in the public interest, because he runs a surveillance company whose clients include governments. Of course, to you, not supporting eugenics or the extermination of the Jewish race is just a matter of opinion.
Comments like these show that individuals with these horrendous beliefs are everywhere, including all over Hacker News and the tech industry at large. Hacker New's moderators would do well to focus on these bad-faith actors instead of flagging anti-hate content.
> > "But extremism has been central to 8chan identity since it was founded in 2013 by a computer programmer and self-proclaimed eugenicist Fredrick Brennan."
This is highly exaggerated and misleading language, and makes it hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
Mr Brennan has osteogenesis imperfecta, where the bones in his limbs are malformed, and constantly breaking and splintering in his flesh, and it is very painful, and there is no treatment. In a moment of deep frustration, some trolls were able to goad him into venting online about how he regrets being born and how cruel it is for his parents to knowingly bring him into this world.
Calling him a "eugenicist" is ludicrous. That language makes him sound like he is somehow punching down at innocent people. He is suffering in a way most of us could never understand, and has moments where he wishes he were dead.
His position is that “If you don’t support my extensive writing about race science, you’re a bigot and a liar because of an incident unrelated to my extensive writing about race science, which has singularly made me a victim of the mob - not my actual writing or opinions. Any criticism of me personally is by definition predicated on the thing I said in 2017 and not my body of work since then.”
The guy is doing his best trying to eradicate from the gene pool the kind of people receptive to arguments like his. In other words, he's doing God's work.
Well I mean obviously political beliefs are not heritable. But this guy does seem to have made a name for himself as an internet socialist, judging by his other publications
He really comes off as a sociopath if you check his Twitter, where he calls someone a moron, keeps attacking Elizabeth Warren, and treats Alex Jones/Info Wars as a serious media outlet [0]. Also, it's hilarious that he considers himself the target of a racist conspiracy but goes to great lengths to deny that Trump's and Bannon's racist politics. And this is a guy who is running for senate.
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