I have caught wind that somebody has been digging through the archives of the Extropians listserv with a view towards finding embarrassing materials to disseminate about people.
But I fear that selected pieces of the most offensive stuff will be extracted, maliciously framed and interpreted, and used in smear campaigns. To get ahead of this, I want to clean out my own closet, and get rid of the very worst of the worst in my contribution file.
It does seems plausible that this was prompted by someone finding this email and pointing it out, or asking him to comment on it (e.g. an author of a hit piece asking him for comments). It sounds like he is at least worried about this possibility. In any case, given this was in response to an event, I don’t think this is what most people would interpret as “proactively highlighting”, unless you meant proactively reacting to a PR risk. He could also be acting proactively by some definition of that word but still doing so primarily because he regrets getting caught.
From the apology:
It does seems plausible that this was prompted by someone finding this email and pointing it out, or asking him to comment on it (e.g. an author of a hit piece asking him for comments). It sounds like he is at least worried about this possibility. In any case, given this was in response to an event, I don’t think this is what most people would interpret as “proactively highlighting”, unless you meant proactively reacting to a PR risk. He could also be acting proactively by some definition of that word but still doing so primarily because he regrets getting caught.
Update: Torres was indeed going to write some thing about it.
https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1613585031850786816