Hacker News Reader

Jensen attracted a lot of attention because he did not just write that the NINA signs did not exist, he said the Irish were and are delusional, that in order to sustain a sense of victimhood they had manufactured a group-wide lie of discriminatory anti-Irish ads and signs. He said that believing that No Irish Need Apply Signs existed was the Irish equivalent of believing in leprechauns. Here is what Jensen wrote more than a decade ago:

If this is a remotely accurate characterization, it baffles me that Jensen's work would have found a home in a journal or that he would have felt comfortable expressing those views in public. How profoundly emotional and unscientific (not to mention vile and insulting)

Such a claim is extremely complicated (defying occam's razor) and implies some sort of conspiracy that is at the very least questionable without sound proof. The idea that such claims would have not been aggressively debunked in the past is pretty questionable, as well. The seemingly trivial task of finding evidence to support the existence of these ads makes me wonder if Jensen did any research at all. Was he just grinding his racist axe, and did the scientific community give him a pass on it because they didn't care?

View on HN