I used to think that ESR had slid slowly into the lunatic fringe, but it sounds like he was a crank from the start. He pursued fame but seems to prefer notoriety to compromise. I think there’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is.
Humility maybe? No matter how right you think you are, beware: you might be ESR.
Yeah if you want to talk about sliding slowly into lunacy, it'd be a once-respected computer scientist who now haunts online discussions looking for anything which could be obliquely linked to one of his personal betes noires and flooded with semi-irrelevant copy-paste.
I thought it was relevant context for the discussion. I’ve read some real gems in his big pasted blocks.
[dead]