Here[0] is a post by someone else who (by his own account) "worked for RMS longer than any other programmer."
While he obviously has had a long relationship with Stallman, one of his key takeaways was:
"RMS’s loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because they are the right thing in the total situation."
Which I think is very well said. So while Paull's assessment that people's reaction to some email quotes is out-of-proportion, this is really just the proverbial straw on the back of the camel.
> Bushnell and I overlapped in our employment at FSF. ... The general culture of inclusiveness and tolerance that RMS fostered meant that, at least when I was there alongside Bushnell, that social circle in and around the organization was feminized and all the stronger for it. This does not mean, of course, that RMS (or any of us) never gave offense or acted stupidly. But Bushnell's portrait showing a depraved sexist coddled by this or that MIT prof. is simply bullshit, and Bushnell probably knows or should know that in his heart.
Frankly, Bushnell and the response to him clearly show none of this should be decided in the court of public opinion. Even if either of these people are correct, none of what we've read or heard so far is in any way sufficient to condemn Stallmann and ruin his career and none of us is in an appropriate position to make that determination. He underwent utter character assassination in the media who went to great lengths to pretend his argument regarding that other MIT professor was about defending Epstein and pedophilia and I'm still mad that so many people fell for it. Maybe Stallmann might possibly be a terrible piece of shit, but this wasn't the way to go.
Nobody is talking about luck. He was the victim of an unfair and unjust attack by the media, who distorted his words in a disgusting way. There is no way to justify that by referring to his other behavior, no matter how bad it may be.
Do you think it was okay that he escaped censure so many times for no substantive/relevant reason? Do you think it's okay that he now is unfairly harshly censured, again for no substantive/relevant reason?
What I'm trying to say is that the two answers should be the same.
The guy is important for one reason only. He was extremely prophetic, and started an important movement that increased our computing freedoms significantly.
He was always socially maladjusted. I remember him eating his toenails while sitting on-stage a decade ago. That kind of thing shouldn't matter for what he represents and does.
No, he stayed as a guest at the home of one of the DKUUG regulars and his girlgriend, who afterwards wrote an angry article about it in the DKUUG-nyt. I see the early-nineties issues have been scanned, http://www.dkuug.dk/wp-content/themes/dkuug/arkiv, but I haven't the time to look through them now. The main issues were matters of personal hygiene and the way he treated the girlfriend.
There's a reason all these stories stay so vague - as soon as the details come out, it turns out to be lies, exaggerations or really really minor stuff.
By keeping the narrative at the level of "fouled up his room", "made women feel uncomfortable", "drove people out of open source" the people who attack him can make sure that no one can prove them "wrong". Of course, they also ensure that they can't prove anything themselves, but it's not really about that.
That archive is a gem on its own! I can't find the article about RMS though, and I've scanned through about 16-17 issues so far. Do you happen to know which issue it is?
Aside from that, this is a great magazine and it's so much fun reading through old articles from the 80s and 90s about Unix. I didn't know Denmark had such a large Unix scene back then.
I've clicked a fair few myself, looking for it... I read the story in 1994 or slightly later, but it was old already. I'm running the whole archive through pdfsandwich now to be able to grep.
Thanks. Read it now. This is a great article and I laughed out loud several times. RMS is a true eccentric.
Note the footnote:
>> Det skal iøvrigt nævnes, at RMS til daglig bor på sit kontor på Massaschusets Institute of Technology, hvor han engang har arbejdet, så det er måske ikke så mærkeligt, at hans sociale evner er begrænsede.
Thank you for the link. My impression is that RMS mainly had some opinions which were leftover from the “free love” movement of the 1960s and 1970s which were not particularly shocking or out of line back then, but are considered job-losing toxic opinions here in 2019.
For the record, as someone who saw that whole movement first hand, I disagree with the whole “free love” movement and think sex should only be done in a lifetime monogamous commitment.
I have met and have had dinner with RMS; he came off to me as a very kind person who has very strong principles. I do not see the imaginary monster that the outrage clickbait media is trying to make RMS be in him.
> [P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
> I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
Without saying anything about my own stance on these opinions, it’s intellectualy weak to consider it a firable offense to have uttered them thirteen years ago. People should be stronger than that, and have a wider perspective.
Those words didn't disappear and resurfaced from some secret tape or whatever. They're on his own blog, first-party information quoted all over the place, and recent email scandal just proves that he never really changed.
Also, here's a quote of his about people with Down syndrome:
> If you'd like to love and care for a pet that doesn't have normal human mental capacity, don't create a handicapped human being to be your pet. Get a dog or a parrot...
Seriously, everyone's better off with him gone, including free software as a whole. He's not worth defending. It was about damn time he actually faced some consequences for his shitty behavior.
He just called a human being with down syndrome the same as a pet. a human being, nobody is having problems with reading comprehension except the people that have the same mentality as him (pedos, topminds, etc.)
I mention this elsewhere in this sub-thread, but RMS was not completely out of line in 2003 or 2006 writing those kind of things. It was an era when it was still an open question whether the Wikipedia should have pro-pedophilia advocacy in their entries.
For the record, I have never endorsed those positions [1], but I also see that they were on the fringe of acceptable discussion at the time.
Just because a few people where discussing this doesn't make it out of line. I remember 2003-2006 well enough. There was no discussion in society about this.
> It was an era when it was still an open question whether the Wikipedia should have pro-pedophilia advocacy in their entries.
NAMBLA and similar will take every opportunity to push pro-paedophile[1] and pro-abuse positions. Your example just speaks to the nativity of Wikipedia (and a bunch of other US tech companies) around people who commit contact offences against children.
But we need to be clear: this was not in anyway a mainstream position. It was a smallish number of child abusers gaming a system.
The most recent example isn't just about what he said though. It's about how he said it. And it's this that people find unacceptable. The discussion was about how to manage the potentially serious image problem when a high profile member of the organisation has been accused of sexually assaulting a child.
Either he doesn't know that this is the wrong time to say those things, or he does know and doesn't care, but either way it made it harder for other people to do their job - managing the comms of having your organisation financially linked to a high profile sex offender.
[1] I guess we need to say that some people with a sexual interest in children will not commit offences against children, and so some pro-paedophile commentary is acceptable.
>I guess we need to say that some people with a sexual interest in children will not commit offences against children, and so some pro-paedophile commentary is acceptable.
this is just incredibly stupid to believe, pro-paedophile commentary is acceptable? why in the ever living fk would that be aceptable? because a pedo might not actually commit those acts? are you stupid?
Damn, he actually wrote that under his real name? That was unwise. I wouldn't even say that as Mirimir. Except about prostitution and adultery, of course.
There was also one that I can't be bothered to find that goes something along the lines of "teens sext each other, therefore child pornography should be legal".
Well, there was that recent case about the tween girl who got convicted of distributing child pornography for sexting another tween.
So it's obvious to me that underage sexting itself shouldn't be prosecuted as child porn. Because if they're old enough to prosecute as adults, they're also old enough to legally share naked pictures of themselves.
But of course, it's arguable that third parties -- especially adult third parties -- who distribute such images should be prosecuted.
Look, this conversation right here that you're making is exactly why people beiing willing to take a stance against these sorts of "thou shalt be dumped upon for even mentioning" things is necessary.
He's not a fool in that regard. He understands that as long as you can attach paedophilia to something, this type of outrage phenomena can completely sink any attempt at civil discourse, and can be weaponized in order to force through liberty/civic rights destructive measures. Think about it.
We could frame an Act to implement Panopticon for the sake of catching Paedophiles, and then poof! Resistance disappears because if you dissent, you're now pro-paedophile! Yet every last civic minded person who values personal freedom/liberty should be able to tell that the inevitable result of such a system being implemented is inevitable abuse.
Now replace that with LGBT rights, or women's rights, or sexual assault, or any other controversial theme under the sun.
You cannot have the Nazi exception. In any form, or on any topic. Freedom is Freedom. And you can't even dismiss it with a handwave to the freedom to experience consequences either, because you're just perpetuating the sin you're willing to punish Stallman for by tolerating the outright lies of the reporter which fueled the whole thing in the first place.
People need to put the pitchforks down, and go about your day. You should advise the people who started the entire hubbub that the proper place to deal with that disagreement was with Stallman himself in private, maybe with an administrator.
If we resort to mob justice to get our way, we end up throwing out any semblance of Order to our country, instead we just end up with a reflexive gaggle of inflammable passions waiting for the next match to be struck.
I hate to say it, but you really can't fault Stallman on this one. You can be annoyed. You can find it distasteful; but in the end he is exactly right. It is important that the more heinous the accusation, the greater the pains needed to be taken to ensure that we specifically and only read into what is actually there, and adhere to what is actually actionable by law.
Otherwise you see exactly what has erupted here. An outburst of rage against someone completely uninvolved, combined with the burning down of the metaphorical village for what?
A Five Minute Rage?
Christ, how Orwellian! 1984 isn't even being misused as a manual. It's here and now. God help us.
This is incredibly dramatic. Orwell warned us of governmental censorship. Huxley warned us of government and citizen complacency. What we are experiencing here is something else, and it's NOT in the form of a law, or a punishment, or anything else. The government is not enforcing these actions on anyone. People are free to mob around an idea and attempt to actuate results. You can still speak your mind. It has nothing to do with 'Our Country'. Your equating of the two is worrisome
>People are free to mob around an idea and attempt to actuate results. You can still speak your mind. It has nothing to do with 'Our Country'. Your equating of the two is worrisome
You are free to "mob" around an idea. Yes. You are free to actuate to generate results. I do not contest that.
>Equating of Our Country
I'm merely referencing a collective investment and faith in a system of Law and Order as set forth in the Constitution.
Everyone is free to believe as they want, but reality demands it's toll when your "belief" begins to extract cost in the form of pursuits of extrajudicial justice. When you start seeing the lynch mobs gather (which make no mistake, this type of escalation isn't that far off from; reputational violence is still violence), I put my foot down.
It darn well should be concerning. There are clearly battle lines being drawn. There is a growing corpus of individuals that see fit to utilize internetworking and information warfare through disinformation to cause harm; without due process, or respect to any authority or attempts at officially mediated redress.
Civilization depends on mutual restraint, and unity in the agreed upon means to the redress of grievance. If individuals cannot come to the table to resolve their issues in a private manner, or do something novel, like calling each other out on something without outright lying in a public forum, or maliciously smearing each other in a manner unable to withstand basic scrutiny, but leading to a widespread disruption of the peace, then battle lines are well on their way to being drawn. Voicing the truth is one thing. Sometimes, it is unpleasant, but needs to be spoken.
; but to spread lies and slander maliciously to the end of tormenting hatred is another.
I have no qualms with any of these people's causes. My beef is with their means. Given the increasing frequency with which people seem to be taking rather cavalier positions with the truth, and asserting that others should be deprived of their station without due process of any kind (the nigh inevitable result of a malicious false media campaign), a boiling point is clearly coming.
I hate it. I don't know what to do about it, but it is written on the wall clear as day. There is very serious change on the horizon. This digital age has brought forth the new lynch mob. A veritable army of people can rebroadcast the worst types of untruth about you with little or no redress. I can't even say I can endorse their behavior from an ends justifies the means point of view. If everyone got these types of posses together and went after everyone else all the time, I don't see a reachable equilibrium. The sides just get larger, and wider until you either have the very quintessential example of the oppressed minority (thereby the minority deserves legal protection), or both sides get large, polarized, and energized enough where should violence break out, it's a threat to the entire system.
I'm afraid our civilization is in the fits of a social anaphylaxis; and I have no idea what the anti-histamine would be. The adrenaline analog, however, is something we all know, and history has demonstrated time and again.
Violence.
I don't want it to come to that. If we can't stop making war against each other with words, there is nothing to keep us from falling upon each other with fists when the time comes that patience wears thin.
Stallman, for all everyone is enraged at his gall and supposed insensitivity, said what absolutely needed to be said.
I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't care for everyone involved. I understand. I may not agree, but damnit, I understand. I wish the entire thing never happened. That Epstein and his shenanigans would have been dealt with years ago instead of being allowed to fester. That none of those girls had to go through what they did. That two men of great intelligence weren't caught in the middle of it.
But letting things devolve to this level of incivility is unacceptable. I cannot, and Will not on any last scrap of good conscience stand by and let this travesty play out without being heard.
If all it means, is that everyone reads this, and waves me off as a crank so be it. I can accept failure. I tried. It is my hope that maybe, just maybe; even if it isn't in this issue in particular, mywords can act as a seed.
A seed from which others may find that within the fertile landscape of their minds will burst forth a renewed commitment to treat each other with decency, respect, civility, and forgiveness.
I don't care who you believe in, but if you can muster at least those four qualities,and maintain them to any degree, there is naught to be feared.
Good night, and may whom you worship (if any) bless.
> Rick Falkvinge joins me in demanding an end to the censorship of "child pornography", and points out that if in the US you observe the rape of a child, making a video or photo to use as evidence would subject you to a greater penalty than the rapist.
> The article does not mention that it's common practice for teenagers to exchange nude photos with their lovers, and they all potentially could be imprisoned for this. A substantial fraction of them are actually prosecuted.
> The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
> Some rules might be called for when these acts directly affect other people's interests. For incest, contraception could be mandatory to avoid risk of inbreeding. For prostitution, a license should be required to ensure prostitutes get regular medical check-ups, and they should have training and support in insisting on use of condoms. This will be an advance in public health, compared with the situation today.
> Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-25 because the old link was broken.]
> I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
> In the US, people convicted for having copies of child pornography tend to get longer prison sentences than those convicted of having sex with children.
> Mere possession of child pornography should not be a crime at all. To prosecute people for possessing something published, no matter what it may be, is a big threat to human rights.
> "Child" pornography is being used as an excuse to threaten all American internet users' privacy.
> The term "child pornography" is dishonest. The censorship of it puts young lovers in direct danger of prosecution.
> Many published works are disgusting, but censorship is more so. In the Internet, enforcement of censorship puts other rights in danger.
> Please support demandprogress.org's campaign against this bill.
There are loads of these. Stallman takes a hardline anti-Censorship view, and he sees any prohibition on possession or distribution of images of child sexual abuse as censorship.
His argument about criminalising children who share images of themselves with other children has a simple fix: stop prosecuting children for doing stupid shit.
> His argument about criminalising children who share images of themselves with other children has a simple fix: stop prosecuting children for doing stupid shit.
That would be less rule of law, and more blind faith in the benevolence of public officials.
Can you explain why these opinions are inappropriate? What makes someone with aggressively libertarian views unsuitable to lead the Free Software Foundation?
Did I say he should not be" allowed to write software or work at a university"?
It is concerning to me that RMS would allow kids to make adult decision while at the same time saying that adults selling software to other adults under licenses he doesn't like should be punished.
Libertarians typically believe in a right of contracting something which RMS doesn't so it may not be totally correct to examine his ideas from a strict Libertarian viewpoitn.
That is absolutely a false equivalency. I don't think you'll find any evidence that RMS believes people shouldn't be able to _discuss_ selling propriety software, or disagree with free software, or anything else.
He thinks people should be punished for selling proprietary software correct?
He also isn't sure than "voluntary pedophilia" is harmful / that people before puberty should be able to pick their sex partners despite not even being a teenager.
Limiting this to being just a discussion on what can be "discussed" isn't valid. He appears to support actions that harm others by some of his statements.
> He thinks people should be punished for selling proprietary software correct?
No? I'm not really sure what you mean by "punish" here. He advocates for Free Software -- to my knowledge he's never advocated for punishing anybody.
> He appears to support actions that harm others by some of his statement.
How? Where's the harm? What's harmful about questioning the age of consent being 18 (which, may I remind you, varies from 12-19 worldwide). Why are some aspects of US law declared beyond the scope of acceptable discourse? You can disagree with him (I certainly do) but I don't see why we should shame him for even broaching the subject.
"I'm all in favour of the principle that it's good to reward people who do things that contribute to society and it's good to punish people, one way or another, if they do things that harm society. This means that people who develop Free Software that's useful deserve a reward, and people who develop proprietary software that's attractive deserve a punishment."
We aren't talking about the age of consent. RMS explicitly said children before they hit puberty / sexual maturity which is a bit different than a 17 year old to most people.
> Why are some aspects of US law declared beyond the scope of acceptable discourse?
They're not, it's fine to talk about these things, and there are plenty of places where people discuss all aspects of law around sexual offending.
The wrong time and place to talk about them is when your organisation is discussing potential problems because a high profile person linked to your organisation has been accused of raping a coerced child. People in that thread needed a useful way to deal with "MIT has links to Epstein, and Minsky is accused of raping a child". RMS's diversions into "is it rape?" and "is it assault?" were not helpful to that thread.
Either RMS was oblivious to the distress and distraction his comments would cause, or he knew and didn't care. Neither is good.
Wouldn't it better for MIT's reputation if people weren't jumping to the conclusion that one of their professors would willingly rape people? Did anyone actually believe Marvin Minsky of all people would do that? I wonder what he will have to say about this when he gets unfrozen.
> Either RMS was oblivious to the distress and distraction his comments would cause
First, the conversation was internal, it was leaked to the public.
Second, it's nothing new. He's been documenting his opinions for decades.
Third, it was a relevant discussion because he was talking about the characterization of the events by the media.
If you just have a bone to pick with RMS I'm not sure what there is left to discuss.
If there is a requirement that the head of the FSF is easily understood by ordinary people there can't be a head of the FSF. Ordinary people don't understand or care about software freedom. The acknowledgement of that was why the Open Source people split from the Free Software people back in the day. The best anyone can do is make arguments that are correct if someone takes the time to read and think through them. Stallman is that sort of person, and that is likely the sort of person who is going to be at the head of the FSF if they are effective and not just a vague cheerleader. This current 'scandal' is probably a sign that the Free Software movement will die and be subsumed into the Open Source world - anyone promoting freedom is going to be a radical.
In this case, I expect but don't have time to check that Stallman is using a very wide definition of coerced that captures most or all of whatever you are uncomfortable with and he is going to be technically correct on most if not all of his original points. That is completely in his style.
And more to the issue at hand, these are questions that are irrelevant to Stallman's position as head of the FSF or his role in MIT. He is not using his position to push pro-adultery themes. He is calling on people to think about what words mean and what the implications of those meanings are. People can't kick up a stink for something that happened 10 years ago and claim that nothing has changed. Stallman is perfectly happy to stand up and say that he's changed his mind on many points. A couple of lines on a personal website are just not that insightful into his character.
Also, whether alcohol or drugs should be available for consumption by anybody is still an open question. That is a different debate. Most of the arguments as to why a 10 year old shouldn't be drinking can actually be applied to a 40 year old. The major difference (brain development) is a big deal but there are a lot of other problems with addictive substances that are not age dependent. Why should it be acceptable for a 40 year old to drink but not a 10 year old? There are interesting aspects to consider there and to logically pin down the reasoning to a moral framework requires quite a bit of thought and probably discussion with others.
How do you reach that conclusion from what I posted? If punishing people for the wrong ideas is wrong is RMS wrong for saying those who release closed source software are deserving of punishment?
My guess is he means punished in the marketplace, ie, not buying proprietary software - not punish as in throw them in jail for buying/selling proprietary software.
It's a perfect example of where our society seems to be heading. Taking words and sentences out of their context and publishing the fragments over and over leads to incomplete understanding and misinterpretation.
To me, this is similar to the recent cases where some public figure said the N word 10 years ago, and so their present company fired them. Remember the phrase from childhood "Stick and stone may break my bones but words can never harm me." That's the principle of free speech. We sure don't have that anymore.
If you are a media person and use the N word in your position, and it's against your employer's policy to do that, fine - you're fired. But if you personally are a racist or hate gays or whatever, that should be your choice, and if you say the N word to your neighbor and they record it, your employer should not be able to fire you.
We have become way too sensitive IMO, and the fact that news is on 24/7 (they have to fill that time with something!) and is more about evoking feelings, spouting opinions and prophecies, and sensationalism than it is about facts, is a big part of the problem.
man, taken seriously most of it does sound awfully wrong of course, no argument here. Yet about taking it seriously - this is the quote that follows yours a bit later :
" Necrophilia would be my second choice for what should be done with my corpse, the first being scientific or medical use. Once my dead body is no longer of any use to me, it may as well be of some use to someone. "
Yeah, from someone who was there, that's almost it. I'd add hacker punk as another key influence. But seriously, you don't say that stuff in public these days.
Edit: Even if you're joking, or just doing it to light people up. Which was, you know, quite the thing. Back in the day.
And damn, had to work at it, but I found a couple BOFH episodes that actually mention women.[0,1]
Yeah, I agree that you don’t say that stuff in public these days, and I have always felt that, with Romeo-and-Juliet exceptions, the age of consent should be respected.
Keep in mind that, around the time RMS posted those more controversial blog entries (which I still feel are being quoted out of context [1]), the Wikipedia was allowing out and out pedophiles to post their disgusting and repulsive pro-pedophilia advocacy [2]. And, yes, I found that advocacy repulsive back then and find it repulsive today. [3]
It normalized the objectification of women [1] and allowed sexual predators [2] to flourish.
[1] Objectification: instead of treating a woman like a person, they were reduced to being a body to satisfy a man’s base urges.
[2] Sexual predator: Men who do not care about women as human beings but merely see them as potential sexual conquests, and who do dishonest and manipulative stuff to get a woman to have sex with them. Dishonest stuff includes getting a woman drunk so they will consent to sex; lying about one’s wealth or achievements (the canonical example is someone who never joined the military claiming they are a Navy SEAL); etc.
You may find it hard to believe, but there were lots of young women who were just extremely promiscuous. Just as promiscuous as the young men were. Free sex was a political statement. A form of rebellion against the status quo. And of course, it was enabled by the ready availability of antibiotics and hormonal birth control.
I saw a lot of that movement too, probably not as much as you.
My sense is that no one was finding any real satisfaction from having short term strictly sexual relationships, and my sense in this day and age of #MeToo (which I very strongly feel has become a witch hunt) is that some men were hurting some women emotionally by only wanting them for sex.
Right. I was an illegal immigrant from Russia. And an LSD dealer. I was also ~homeless, and living out of a VW bug.
It wasn't about having "meaningful relationships". It was about having fun. And forgetting about dying in a nuclear war. For those who weren't alive in 1962, you really have no clue.
Just wanted to say it’s fantastic to see this perspective expressed so clearly, when many have taken the puritanical aspects of feminism to heart as something that’s obvious and certain in educated society.
It’s as if certain aspects of preferences and free will are now inconceivable. Refreshing to see a more accurate historical account.
>> hurting some women emotionally by only wanting them for sex.
I can definitely say as a man that in the context of some women in my life I would be hurt if sex is the only thing they wanted from me, too.
I don't necessarily see how the whole free-love movement is supposed to be responsible for my delusions about what kind of a lover I am currently hanging out with, though.
Hmm, I think those are pre-existing pathologies in society that free-love folks have worked really hard both to prevent—by empowering women, by frowning upon non-lesbian couplings, by talking extensively about informed and enthusiastic consent, and by fostering cross-gender friendships the monogs were suspicious of—and to reduce the harm from, for example, with birth control, condoms (and strong norms against not using them), and by socially supporting single motherhood. Sex parties in free-love circles very frequently have strict rules against alcohol, while many serial monogamists can only copulate when intoxicated. So I think you're probably mistaken.
The “free love” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as I understand it, did not really have people widely using condoms. It was assumed that women were on the pill or used a diaphragm.
Condoms only really became a thing in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic hit the world.
Your post gives me a lot of hope; I really hope that we can reverse the trend of people, particularly young people in their 20s, having sex less and less. [1]
I personally would not partake in such a free love movement, but I really want to see, post-#MeToo, a world where it’s OK for a man to sexually desire a woman, as long as he also sees her as a person with feelings, is not being manipulative to get sex, and fully respects consent.
Bushnell calls himself a "social justice warrior". These exact words. And in my experience, he's lived up to the common meaning of that phrase. Does this behavior affect how you should regard Bushnell's recent article? Make up your own mind.
> "The general culture of inclusiveness and tolerance"
That was not the Stallman I saw at CSAIL. There are many good things to be said about Stallman, but in multiple years there I never saw either tolerance or inclusivity.
It’s almost as though two people can see the same situations or behaviour and come to different conclusions as to the nature and motivation behind them. What is obviously sexist to one person might be normal behaviour to another.
Bushnell* writes a very reasonable piece. It deals with a number of issues with Stallman as a leader of the FSF and MIT and suggests Stallman is unlikely to come back to either of those institutions.
But he doesn't deal with what the big problem here is - the way this was done is concerning. Stallman wasn't forced to resign by people like him - who are quite happy to say "Look, Stallman, you've dedicated your life to this, you've done good work, but we want to take the movement into a more mainstream place".
Stallman resigned in the middle of a press firestorm, based on lies, with people publicly accusing him of supporting someone he called a 'serial rapist'. He is now facing large numbers of people retroactively justifying his treatment by spreading various rumours that may or may not be true but certainly can't be enumerated and assessed for accuracy. They are unfalsifiable and undebunkable because so far there is very little substance and a lot of hearsay. I've seen the odd comments justifying all sorts of weird assumptions, in one case literally because 'he was an eccentric bloke'. This is gross pigeonholing and stereotyping.
This is not a reasonable process and the outcomes are horrible. Stallman has literally dedicated his life to trying to make the world better for other people. He was bought down by leaks by someone who now says "Did I even really know who Richard Stallman was before those emails? To be honest, not really" [0]. This is not how these things should be done and it bodes very poorly for the future of the FSF. Not only is there no particular reward for leading the FSF, there is also the risk of being publicly shamed and driven out.
There is a difference between leadership change by mob rule, and leadership change by voting and process. This isn't a sustainable way of doing things. It is really bad.
Stallman resigned in the face of people who had always known who he was being faced with the reality that the rest of the world also knew. The motivation wasn't the misquotes of his already abhorrent argument.
Because attempting to redefine "sexual assault" such that it only applies to cases that involve physical violence is an attempt to reduce the perception of the seriousness of the crime
Quoting Debbie Harry from an interview published just yesterday [1]:
> She is similarly dismissive of another horrific incident. In the early 70s, when she and Stein were coming home after a gig, a man followed them and forced them at knifepoint to let him into their apartment. He was looking for drugs and equipment. He tied up Stein, then Harry. Once he had piled up the equipment he was going to take – guitars, Stein’s camera – he raped her on the bed.
> In her book, she writes: “I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape.” Can this be true? “Yes,” she says. “I mean, I was angry and I felt victimised. I wasn’t beaten or harmed physically, it was all emotional or mental. Being raped – or fucked – by some stranger against my will at knifepoint, you know …” She pauses and sighs. “It wasn’t a happy moment in my life, but I really, seriously, empathise with women who are beaten. That would be something that [would lead to] emotional ramifications for the rest of my life. But this doesn’t.”
> She knows it may seem hard to believe. “It is ludicrous,” she says, “and it is kind of funny that I would say it, but, truly, I wasn’t physically molested. Afterwards, I was with Chris, and I was, you know …” She makes a sound to signal the horror she must have felt. “I went on with my life. But as I say, I wasn’t beaten or assaulted and I think that, coupled with being sexually violated, is truly awful. Then you are really made to feel powerless.” But she was tied up at knifepoint. Didn’t that make her feel powerless? “Yeah. Not the same. It wasn’t for me anyway.” She didn’t have counselling, and says Stein was supportive “and we moved on”.
So Debbie Harry is certainly making a distinction here between forced sex alone and forced sex with physical violence. And for her that distinction makes what she suffered less serious than if it had included physical violence. Do you want to discount her opinion too?
It can be taken that way. But if "sexually" is omitted from "sexually assaulted" a statement can easily be misunderstood. If you add in the context that there was no direct accusation of sexual assault by the victim towards Minsky, I do find reasonable to talk about how these terms are used. I even understand his argument that these terms best not be used in accusations because there are better ones.
I find your interpretation of "an attempt to reduce the perception of the seriousness of the crime" a highly incharitable reading of what he says!
The definition of "sexual assault" covers what allegedly took place. Yes, if you change the words used, you end up with an inaccurate statement. Why is that something that needs to be pointed out?
Stallman's entire point is that he feels the use of the word "assault" causes people to believe the crime is more serious than he believes it is. Pointing that out isn't uncharitable.
Using the word assault causes people to believe a different thing happened. It says nothing about the gravity of each kind of crime except that they shouldn't be the same.
The only reason "sexual assault" covers what allegedly took place is because the expression was redefined in the first place to cover two separate things, which is exactly the problem. Stallman called not for redefining "sexual assault" as you put it, but for undoing a redefinition that puts it at odds with how those terms are conventionally used and causes unnecessary confusion.
And "free software" makes people believe that the software costs nothing, but Stallman's position there isn't to suggest that we should always use a different term. Why not?
I agree the expression "Free Software" has the same problem. However the alternatives also have some problems. He discusses that here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
(I'm sure you've already read it, but it's always worth a re-read)
I'm partial to the term "Libre" myself, though in this case it doesn't matter much, since it's a concept that people aren't familiar with anyway and you have to explain it no matter what word you use.
Stallman's position is pretty clearly that we should use precise language always. It seems a pretty impeccable position to me. The only people I can think of who benefit from conflating coercive and non-coercive crimes under the same term are the ones who profit from the confusion.
It's unfortunate that the legal definition became broader for the same reason I think the common definition shouldn't.
I imagine however that most legislatures get around the issue by having explicit paragraphs establishing harsher punishments for violent rape vs mutually-accepted statutory rape.
Yes, the Eben Moglen who is suing another free software organisation for trademark infringement, threatened to sue them for copyright infringement under a ludicrous misreading of the relevant license, threatened to ruin the life of an FSF board member, and who was fired by the FSF for briefing against the FSF's interests while being paid by Oracle.
> suing another free software organisation for trademark infringement
Trademarks have to be enforced or you lose them.
> threatened to ruin the life of an FSF board member
Can you please backup this claim? I've found nothing to validate it.
> and who was fired by the FSF for briefing against the FSF's interests
According to every source I've found he resigned himself and voluntarily stepped down and left "on good terms" to take care of SFLC which he had recently founded.
It might be political jargon, but there is no way to prove he was fired.
> FSF's interests while being paid by Oracle.
AFAIK Moglen never worked or took money from Oracle.
> Trademarks have to be enforced or you lose them.
His trademark is on "Software freedom law center", and he's suing the Software Freedom Conservancy. He doesn't hold a trademark on "Software Freedom".
> Can you please backup this claim? I've found nothing to validate it.
I was there when it was reported and had confirmation from a witness.
> According to every source I've found he resigned himself and voluntarily stepped down and left "on good terms" to take care of SFLC which he had recently founded.
> It might be political jargon, but there is no way to prove he was fired.
I was on the board when he was fired.
> AFAIK Moglen never worked or took money from Oracle
> He doesn't hold a trademark on "Software Freedom".
Has he ever claimed that?
> I was there when it was reported and had confirmation from a witness.
It is true because I say so it's not really an answer to the question.
> I was on the board when he was fired.
So you can confirm you fired him?
That's interesting.
Back then you wrote
> This, in conjunction with his behaviour over the ZFS issue, led to him stepping down as the FSF's general counsel.
You did not say "fired" anywhere.
Why didn't you just say "fired"?
> Why would you be in a position to know?
I'm in the position to ask why you're accusing someone of taking money, without proof.
It's just human decency, I happen to be a contributor (a tiny one, but sill one) of both FSF and FSLC and I would like to know if Moglen took money from Oracle to sue other FSF foundations.
You seem to know though, but you don't say.
And even if it was true, is taking money from Oracle a crime per se?
What about taking money from Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft? more than a few FSF folks work there.
You said that it's necessary to sue to protect trademarks. In this case, where is the necessity?
> It is true because I say so it's not really an answer to the question
You can choose to believe me or you can choose to believe I'm lying - entirely up to you.
> So you can confirm you fired him?
Eh. Asked him to resign with the understanding that he'd be fired otherwise.
> And even if it was true, is taking money from Oracle a crime per se?
It's not a crime, it's just inappropriate to take money from a company and provide legal opinions that serve their interests while serving as general counsel for an organisation that strongly and publicly holds a different opinion.
> You said that it's necessary to sue to protect trademarks. In this case, where is the necessity?
I understand you don't like questions.
Moglen founded SFLC and helped SFC come to the light.
He even registered SFC trademark, he asked for the cancellation of SFC, not the trademark of "Free Software".
Now it's sure that no one will try to register a trademark similar to FSLC or FSC dealing with free software.
With that move he protected both.
There's no need to double down on the false accusation line.
Facts are well know by now.
> You can choose to believe me or you can choose to believe I'm lying - entirely up to you.
I'm not a believer.
I prefer the sane way of doing things: reviewing evidence.
You are not providing any, just "believe me or not", which is not what I'd like to do when it's about my money.
You said something about Moglen that upset me, I've just asked for a clarification, that you refuse to provide.
> Eh. Asked him to resign with the understanding that he'd be fired otherwise
So you did fire him, but issued a different statement.
Good to know.
> It's not a crime, it's just inappropriate to take money from a company and provide legal opinions that serve their interests
When did this happen exactly?
Wasn't Moglen providing legal opinions to Debian, the FSF, Canonical, but not Oracle?
And What interests are you talking about?
Is Google any different from Oracle?
One of my favourite programmer ever, Alan Cox (who also kinda look like Stallman), worked for a long time on the Linux kernel but was also being paid by Intel for a few years. What's wrong about that?
> as general counsel for an organisation that strongly and publicly holds a different opinion
The different opinion was a minor difference though.
I remember the OpenZFS problem: the only difference was that Moglen believed that users can legally distribute copies of OpenZFS binary blobs as the result of the compilation of an openly licensed source code, while FSF said no.
They had the same opinion on everything else.
Even Linus said in the past “But one gray area in particular is something like a driver that was originally written for another operating system (ie clearly not a derived work of Linux in origin). At exactly what point does it become a derived work of the kernel (and thus fall under the GPL)?”
Is this enough to fire people?
BTW Canonical have been distributing OpenZFS for years now and the sky has not fallen, nor Oracle have become richer thanks to that. They still distribute the real ZFS (the proprietary one) which is a much better implementation of ZFS.
He protected the Software Freedom Conservancy by accusing it of violating the Software Freedom Law Center trademark? You're going to need to explain that more clearly.
> I've just asked for a clarification, that you refuse to provide.
I've clarified as much as I can. When there's no other public evidence available, what do you want me to do?
> The different opinion was a minor difference though.
> You're going to need to explain that more clearly.
I think you are intelligent enough to understand it on your own.
BTW, I know asking question is good, but sometimes try to answer other people's questions, it's good too!
> When there's no other public evidence available, what do you want me to do?
So we can safely assume he did not do anything you say, he's innocent until proven guilty, like any of us, right?
> It really wasn't.
It really was.
I'm with Joshua Gay (former employee of the FSF Licensing & Compliance Team) on this:
It is not clear to me that there is any contradiction between the SFLC statement and the FSF’s statement on the matter of Linux and ZFS. That is, I can’t really find how the SFLC and FSF differ in their interpretation GPLv2 and CDDL.
I must admit I didn't know who Mr. Bushnell was, so I looked him up. Finding out about his dismissal from GNU Hurd back in 2003 was quite ironic to me:
> RMS has now "dismissed" me as Hurd maintainer because I have publicly spoken against the GFDL, saying that a GNU maintainer must support and speak in favor of GNU policies. If this is really RMS's reason, then it means that he demands the right to control the speech of every GNU volunteer when it comes to GNU project policies. He wants not merely to set the direction, but also to require that each and every one of us publicly support a GNU policy when asked to.
Interesting. Not to entirely doubt what you're saying, but the source for that statement on Wikipedia doesn't have a primary source. Do you happen to have more reading? I would love to have the complete story between them.
One of the issues whenever this sort of cancelling occurs is of the people who come out of the woodwork to join in the calls, it turns out some of them have personal issues with the person aside from their contentious conduct. This is why these things, as others have mentioned, should be tried in official channels, not merely be executed in response to public attitudes and press releases.
What official channels? Nobody has accused RMS of anything that constitutes a crime. (But it's not surprising that the necessary qualifications for leading the FSF are stricter than the qualifications for not being in jail.)
"RMS: I am not very optimistic about the GNU HURD. It makes some progress, but to be really superior it would require solving a lot of deep problems. However, mainly what I think about the HURD is that finishing it is not crucial."
(2) a Googler calling out Stallman is just rich (given the debt Google, its employees, and all modern tech companies owe free software and the relatively little they repay).
Totally. I get that the OP is from Stallman's publicist. But I think a good publicist shouldn't at worse be selective about the truth, not say outright false things like this.
> who is so eagerly ventilating his opinions to feed the wolves? To me it sounds more like he's upset
This is just my reading, but "A reflection on the departure of RMS" does not have the tone of someone who is upset nor someone who is eager. It has the tone of someone who feels like they have a unique perspective that ought to be shared on a difficult subject.
To be fair, he may have motive for being "upset" since he was dismissed from being GNU Hurd's official maintainer by Stallman.
From the Wikipedia link shared:
"Bushnell was Hurd's official maintainer from its instigation until November 2003, when he posted to the GNU project's discussion mailing list saying that he had been dismissed by Stallman for criticizing the GNU Free Documentation License.[5] Stallman said the dismissal was because Bushnell had been inactive since 2001 and wasn't responding to mail."
This quote from the opening paragraph "I recommend in particular Selam G’s original articles on this topic for background" doesn't do much to endear it to me. I'd hardly call the original article a very accurate representation of Stallman's words or even his overall point.
Far be it from me to defend Stallman's outrageous statements and opinions, I don't feel that the original article or the subsequent media frenzy stirred up in its wake is a fair representation of the situation.
The author then goes on in the subsequent paragraphs to talk about how the media circus mischaracterised Stallman...
And not a single word about his dismissal from RMS beforehand? And looking at the older entries on his Wikipedia entry, it seems that the dismissal itself was a controversial topic, with Bushnell claiming disagreement with licensing and RMS claiming communications blackout.
I highly doubt his recount is objective, or even tried to be.
He could've admitted to potentially being biased beforehand, that would've redeemed his account in my eyes, but having me find out that they didn't part on the best of terms leaves a bad taste instead.
How is this different than police planting evidence on a known bad guy and saying, well he was a criminal anyway so who cares, justice was done by putting him in jail with falsified evidence. As long as you get what your deserve, process is irrelevant.
What got Stallman taken down was a false claim that he said Epstein's victims were "willing". That was totally a lie, and the equivalent of planting evidence.
"Famed Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As 'Entirely Willing'."
Was something planted in Stallman's case? Blowing his quotes out of proportion isn't the same thing as planting evidence. I suppose a better analogy is being on your second strike and doing some minor crime to get your third. Some would argue people on two strikes should keep their head down.
Twisting a quote into a different meaning is a lie, and pretty similar to planting evidence. You are saying two strikes, and then we have license to make up a third to take you out.
Selam G wrote that Stallman considered that Minsky's victim was actually willing.
That's not "planting evidence" in a legal sense because sure, that's not evidence at all. Mainly because it isn't true and it's easily verifiable.
But in this context, by these people, it has been taken as actual evidence against Stallman. I guess that's the rationale behind the analogy.
If you read the article she notes that the infamous "hot ladies" photo was the result of someone else writing and then snapping that shot of his office door.
People only see what they want to see. I see a bunch of people beating up on and attacking an awkward "nerd". It reminds me of high school.
> I see a bunch of people beating up on and attacking an awkward "nerd". It reminds me of high school.
That perfectly captures my own impression of this whole debacle.
People keep piling on RMS because he's "weird" rather than anything objectively bad that he's done - notice how often his travel binder is being raised even though it's really completely harmless. That's literally witch-hunt behaviour: persecuting somebody because he's different.
And of the things he was attacked for that would be objectively bad, so much of it turns out to be either a misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or outright fabrication (like apparently the "hot ladies" sign).
I can believe that there is a true kernel of bad behaviour from RMS, but it's blown way out of proportion by all the other stuff around it, and that gives this whole affair the stench of persecuting somebody merely for being different. It's very frustrating.
Hey now, I was the proverbial awkward nerd in highschool, but you know what I've never done? I've never implied that child pornography is okay.. or bestiality.. so I see this differently.
I've heard nasty things come out of that man and I have no interest in listening to him.
This comment also reminded me of highschool - "Yeah, I'm a nerd who gets bullied but hey, at least I'm not like this other nerd who gets bullied. Actually, I agree with the people who bully him that at least he deserves it."
Sarah Mei alternates between aggressive, mocking, and combative. She has no sense of humor. Her worldview is unbelievably bleak and threatening. And she views herself as special -- someone "woke". It's terrible to behold.
The truth is that people make mistakes. People are entitled to their own opinions, however much you may disagree with them. The world exists outside one's self, and any one person just a small, small part of it. The world is not to blame if I feel hurt or threatened, and life is not fair. But within this world we have complete freedom. Do not try to take that away.
Funny how much you can tell about these people from their twitter profile. These people are so privilidged that they have so much time to spend on the most trivial of subjects.
Keep in mind that the premise of the thread (the picture of the name tag on the door) is actually a setup. Someone graffitis on Stallman’s door, and that mob justice character assassination spews forth from it.
Assuming that's correct, and that the "hot ladies" thing happened as she describes, how do you excuse away all the other inappropriate and harassing behavior he's displayed over the years?
Most of "examples" that were in circulation for past days were usually misunderstood jokes that others made at his expense. Seriously - how can one treat somebody mentioning "if he ever hits on you, just tell him you use vim" as an example of what's wrong with rms seriously? Stories about plants being kept by female professors just to scare him away? Please. You need to be completely missing the context to interpret it even remotely close to how it's being used now.
The point is - I've seen plenty thrown around, most very clearly manipulated. What's more - some small amount of them made me doubt in Stallman a bit, like the "knight for ladies" thing, but after a while it turned out it was manipulated as well, so... it feels like standing on rms side here might be a pretty safe bet after all.
If you're too lazy to do the research yourself, I've even found a page that collects it and does proper justice to objectively present them in full context: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/ (although this text could do just as well with a few less "paid to write, not to read" repetitions...)
Either you've been not paying attention (in which case, why are you so self-righteously claiming there's nothing else that happened), or you have been paying attention, and you're deliberately ignoring or are mischaracterizing all the actual, real accounts of bad behavior that have been reported over the past week or two.
Either way, I'm not really in a mood to educate you.
Stallman did nothing to harass people. It's all hearsay. Some of the supposed harassment stories contain verifiably false details, for example, that Stallman was in an open marriage. Stallman was in fact never married. There is a very good reason that we do not admit this level of evidence in courts of law.
You know all the people on Twitter claiming that "numerous" women have confided in them that Stallman kept them out of tech? It's all fake. These claims are identical in structure and purpose to Joseph McCarthy's famous "I have here in my hand a list" line. What the mob is doing now to Stallman is exactly the same thing that the mob did to everyone suspected of communism in the 1950s.
Who says it hasn't been? In general, universities and non-profits and companies don't disclose private reports of abuse or harassment. Who says MIT, the FSF, and GNU Project haven't all been getting private reports in addition to the people tweeting and blogging about their misadventures with RMS?
And regardless, this behavior has apparently been going on for decades without anyone taking action. Can you blame people for thinking that "the right channels" aren't working?
Exactly what channels? The police? A lot of what RMS has done isn't illegal and generally there's a very high legal bar for harassment.
So people eventually share their stories through social media and even that doesn't work sometimes (see: Riot). His behavior doesn't have to cross into illegality to be reprehensible.
For a start just leaving a paper trail of formal complaints at MIT would help ascertain this has been happenning for a long time. I just find it shocking that there is no formal complaint. Instead, what we have is just random people claiming that other people got harassed. None of this is verifiable and honestly if internet has thought us anything it is that everybody lies in social media just to get a few likes.
You realize that that very well could be the case and reason why Stallman stepped down, correct?
MIT could likely get into deep trouble if they chose to publish all of the formal complaints against Stallman for obvious privacy reasons and this incident could've just been the proverbial final straw.
And regardless: Apply Occam's Razor here. What is more likely: A group of random people consisting of professors and students bringing grievances against Stallman, or some sort of conspiracy where all of those people are lying, embellishing etc for some form of revenge? If multiple disconnected people are calling someone an asshole, maybe there's an issue here. It's amazing to what lengths people will attempt to create a narrative defending RMS.
> A group of random people consisting of professors and students
A group of random people with a certain radical ideology, most of which work at google[0][1][2], the military[3], or have personal issues with him due to their history[4][5], etc.
I certainly do not believe that it is a conspiracy - ie they are being honest on the fact that they do not like him (not necessarily on why they do not like him though) and that they are not being paid by someone to do it, but they are far from random people.
Also, I personally saw no professors being involved, although I might be mistaken.
I agree with you, but it is being used as one strike against him. Given that there is evidence that he didn't even do it himself, it further proves how desperate the people who dislike him are to drag him through the mud.
You shouldn't. There's nothing wrong with it. Having an interest in the opposite sex is the most normal thing in the world and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to state it.
> He takes everything literally and doesn’t necessarily take feelings and the reactions of others into account when making statements that are outside the bounds of his expertise in free software.
Whelp, then no one should be that surprised when people stop taking his feelings into account and decide they no longer want to be associated with him.
He’s autistic. Suddenly the people who were annoyingly vocal about being “inclusive” are forgetting Stallman’s disability. He says “creepy” things because he doesn’t understand social cues or casual communication at a certain level. Everyone in this thread demonizing RMS should be ashamed of themselves. This is the same reason why he can’t hold a relationship, or why he sleeps in his office. He’s just far out there - This doesn’t take anything away from his hard work, his genius, or his dedication. He never had a chance. People look at the “evidence”, but refuse to look at it with the proper context.
If you have a condition where you have trouble interacting socially with people, while also running an influential organization and acting as its figurehead, you need to be able to mitigate these issues. If this means you have an assistant who you run emails by before sending them, so be it. If your assistant also takes a look at your office (given to you as a favor by a respected educational institution) and tells you that "Knight of Hot Ladies" is not appropriate, then you take it down. If female colleagues are putting plants in their offices because they know you don't like plants and it will deter you from visiting them, you either need to recognize that on your own and do something about it, or allow a trusted someone to help you fix the situation.
Autism isn't an excuse for bad behavior. It can explain some bad behavior, but that bad behavior cannot continue over decades; it must be dealt with in some manner.
I cannot believe people keep defending him given the accounts of what he's actually done (assuming you believe the accounts). What about the women who have been creeped out or harassed by him, or who have left the field because of him? Don't they get any consideration?
As Matthew Garrett has pointed out (through personal experience with RMS), "the problem isn't that he's unable to understand, the problem is that he's unwilling to"[0]. So I don't buy the "because autism" line here.
At what point is your work no longer your own? FSF wouldn't exist without Stallman's vision and subsequent decades of tireless effort. Who gets to decide that Stallman no longer deserves stewardship over his own life's work because of a poster and some tired anecdote about plants?
At the end of the day, the FSF board had to decide what they wanted to do, either a) let RMS continue to do his usual thing without repercussions and become a less-relevant organization that people don't take seriously, or b) clean house and maintain some level of trust. Presumably they also considered a c) let RMS continue to do his thing and hope that there's no fallout. But I guess they considered (c) wasn't realistic, didn't want (a), and decided on (b).
No one is saying that RMS's work with GNU or the FSF is somehow invalidated. He's done some absolutely fantastic and amazing work, and I honestly do believe that, without him, we are actually losing something valuable. But we're also losing some bad stuff too. My feeling is that the bad stuff outweighs further good that he could do, but of course that's open for debate.
> ... because of a poster and some tired anecdote about plants?
Deliberately minimizing and dismissing the allegations against RMS is a bad-faith way to push forward your argument. Please don't do that here.
What makes it bad faith? Read through this thread. There's a lot of hearsay and misrepresentation and obviously some people just plain uncomfortable with RMS's persona regardless of what he did or didn't say.
And that's why I think this argument:
> a) let RMS continue to do his usual thing without repercussions and become a less-relevant organization that people don't take seriously
doesn't hold any water. First of all, as a lay person, I don't take the FSF seriously anymore because of this move. How can an organization defend our liberties when it's not willing to stand up to a witch-hunt targeting it's founding member? Second and more importantly, I think the people who do matter don't care: they have the reference point to know that this culture shift is fleeting and that, more importantly, FSF wouldn't even exist without someone who stubbornly, aggressively defends digital civil liberties. You can't _have_ the FSF without a Stallman behind it, and my bet would be this is the start of the FSF's slow fade into obscurity.
> First of all, as a lay person, I don't take the FSF seriously anymore because of this move.
I get that, but you're just one person (as am I). If we take all of the people who previously had some respect for the FSF, my guess would be that more than half of them will continue to respect them after this, or actually respect them more (as I will). If all of this had come to light and the FSF have done nothing, I'd respect them less and take them less seriously. I suspect that's true for a lot of other people as well.
Of course, I don't know this for sure, it's just what I think. But that's all we're doing here anyway: just throwing around our opinions.
> the problem isn't that he's unable to understand, the problem is that he's unwilling to
This is a common line used to attack non-neurotypical people (and not only!). They have not considered the possibilities that their explanations or arguments are weak however.
Or, the simpler explanation, given that MJG has known RMS for many, many years, and had interacted with him often, is that his assessment is actually correct.
But still, regardless: assuming all the allegations dredged up about him over the past couple weeks is true, do you actually believe it's ok for him to behave that way? If so, then we should just stop discussing this, because it's not going to be productive. If not, then what would you suggest instead? I presume you'd suggest something less harsh than pressuring him to step down from his leadership roles. But what exactly is there that we can do to improve his behavior, after decades of his lack of desire to change? Would you be fine telling women who have to interact with him that they just have to deal with his harassing behavior? I certainly wouldn't be.
> If your assistant also takes a look at your office (given to you as a favor by a respected educational institution) and tells you that "Knight of Hot Ladies" is not appropriate, then you take it down
The top-posted article/parent says this is exactly what happened to the Hot Ladies remark though! Someone else wrote it on his door, took a picture, and it was taken down!
Yet here you are referencing it as if it was something RMS actually did. How many other lies are being spread and believed due to the game of twitter telephone being played here?
We have one person (this article) claiming this, and others claiming RMS put it there. I'm not sure who to believe, but given the other allegations, it doesn't seem out of character.
But ok, let's assume for a second that the article is telling the truth, and that someone put that there to mess with RMS, and it was promptly taken down, unfortunately too late to prevent a photo getting taken.
So what? How does that invalidate all the other bad stuff RMS has done?
Allow me to substitute autism for a different handicap and see if you still agree:
If you have a condition where you have trouble not swearing, while also running an influential organization and acting as its figurehead, you need to be able to mitigate these issues. If this means you have an assistant who you run emails by before sending them, so be it. If female colleagues are putting plants in their offices because they know you don't like plants and it will deter you from visiting them, you either need to recognize that on your own and do something about it, or allow a trusted someone to help you fix the situation.
tourettes isn't an excuse for bad behavior. It can explain some bad behavior, but that bad behavior cannot continue over decades; it must be dealt with in some manner.
Yes, I absolutely still agree. A mental illness does not absolve you of responsibility for your actions. If someone is a well-known member of some community and is in a position of power and influence, and they have a condition where they have trouble not swearing, I would think that having someone (without that condition) vet their public communications before sending them out would be a minimum logical, smart thing to do.
I think your analogy is a little bit fallacious, though. We're not talking about a verbal tic here; we're talking about actual actions that make women feel unsafe in his presence.
Put another way, I would be far far more comfortable telling someone "hey, yeah, he has a verbal tic that makes him say 'fuck' a lot; it's weird, but just ignore it" than I would be telling a woman, "hey, yeah, he's [something] and that makes him inappropriately hit on you all the time in situations where he has power over you; it's weird, but just ignore it". Yeah... nope.
For what it's worth, since anyone can predict what Matthew Garrett's opinion on this was going to be, it is in the Bayesian sense very weak evidence for anything.
The comment I was replying to was also using the fact that mjg is a specific person who knew Stallman as a reason they are credible. When the thing being discussed is how reliable someone is at conveying private information they have, rather than them making some argument devoid of experience, ad hom is not a fallacy.
It absolutely is an ad hom, I'm just claiming that that is not a fallacy in this case, since the trustworthiness or bias of the dude is the thing we are discussing. Ad hom isn't always a fallacy. Nobody has even discussed any arguments coming from mjg, they're just chalking him up on a tally of who is on whose side. And I think the dude is super biased, and that whose side he is on isn't evidence of anything since he picks sides based on ideology, not on a case-by-case basis.
If you have cancer, you need to mitigate these issues. Cancer is no excuse for dying…
Yes – autism is a perfect explanation for behavior not following typical social norms. That's more or less exactly the core of this disability.
From my point of view RMS really tackles his disability as far as he can: Announces his preferences, choosing interaction forms appropriate to him (email), openly telling that he'll refrain from group discussion…
Besides that I still don't see, where RMS really crossed the lines which requires actions to actually destroy his life. In the same time someone like Trump permanently crosses really vital red lines in all aspects… every… fucking… day…
> I cannot believe people keep defending him given the accounts of what he's actually done (assuming you believe the accounts). What about the women who have been creeped out or harassed by him, or who have left the field because of him? Don't they get any consideration?
No, because obviously, his contributions to free software are more important then him making women uncomfortable in their workplaces/places of study/conferences. /snark
If he had the capacity to comprehend any of this he wouldn't be the sort of person who talked about the Knight of Hot Ladies at work. Unless Garrett somehow turned out to be a some kind of medical expert, his opinion on Stallman is about valid as Stallman's on anyone else.
Even if that's the case, so what? People seem to have been trying to help RMS fix his behavior for decades, and he hasn't. It doesn't matter if that behavior stems from a mental health issue or just him being an asshole. The behavior needs to stop. Ejecting him from MIT, the FSF, and the GNU Project are certainly drastic actions to remove him from places where he can do harm, but at some point, after literally decades, maybe you just give up on trying to change or moderate someone, and get them out of your life.
I think that's fair, but I think there are also a lot of people in this discussion who reject out of hand the idea of: "this person shouldn't ever be in a position of authority over people because their mental health issues cause them to act around those people in ways that end up being construed as inappropriate at best, and actively making people feel unsafe at worst".
A handicap might mean that you just can't do certain things. No, it's not fair, but it's not like we expect the a quadriplegic person to be a long-distance runner... at least not with the medical technology available to us today. I hear a lot of rhetoric (that I agree with) around how a mental illness should be treated just like any other illness and not stigmatized as something to be embarrassed about. But it goes both ways: if a mental illness is just like any other illness (or handicap), then it's perfectly possible that some mental illnesses might mean that some activities aren't feasible, at least not until we understand them well enough to provide better treatments.
I don’t mean to sound snarky, but this really discounts so many factors in how autism is dealt with and even worse it makes it sound as if autistic people are unable to learn how their actions impact people around them, which is of course completely untrue. Autistic people may have difficulty interpreting things such as social cues, but they are absolutely not incapable.
We have indications from many of those closest to RMS that he was willfully dismissive of others feelings. It wasn’t that he was unaware, he was both aware of his difficulties reading others, and made a choice to be dismissive.
It’s painful, I get it. I met RMS many times and still consider him to be one of our era’s great minds and one who’s actions have had nothing short of an incredible impact on society. However, he has–despite this article from his publicist–a long history of bad actions.
I believe there should always be a path forward if people wish to remain a public figure. But this path can’t start with easily disprovable excuses.
The ability to overcome the effect of a disability is partly how severe it is, partly how much and what kind of support one gets and partly time and effort. It's a constant effort and during times of stress it's hard or impossible to maintain.
An awful lot of so-called "normal" men manage to offend women right and left. There are raft loads of women very up in arms about "normal" male behavior.
The world generally has a very long way to go to resolve that question.
Sorry but I'm going to have to ask for the basis of your claim here. It is wellknown that autistic people's lack of selfawareness is varying and inconsistent and how much they can overcome this depends heavily on how much help they received. Normal people misread the intentions of each other on a regular basis yet are somehow experts on the autistic mind?
Just like in the middle ages, there was only a single illness that caused fever (aptly named "fever"). More advanced illnesses required bacteria and viruses which were not invented until 1676 respectively 1892.
I wonder how genetic disorders worked back then considering genes didn't exist yet.
I've come to a very similar conclusion. Outrage culture does have a way of disproportionately targeting those on the spectrum as well as people who might suffer from ADHD/ADD. People who fall into those categories will often be a bit more impulsive when saying whatever's on their mind and will by definition have quite different ways of thinking about things. Simply telling one of these people to stop saying stupid things isn't going to work and makes the person come across as being just as ignorant.
This is bull. He had decades to learn not to make women uncomfortable by doing one single thing - calling his business card his "pleasure" card when he handed it to a woman - and he still does that. That's not autism. Autism might hypothetically lead to doing that until someone pulled him aside and told him it was creepy and made others uncomfortable. After that it's just being an asshole.
> Autism might hypothetically lead to doing that until someone pulled him aside and told him it was creepy and made others uncomfortable.
It's not with autism, but I have first hand experience telling a mentally ill person (diagnosis was schizoaffective) that certain behavior is creepy and made women uncomfortable. They didn't listen. They argued it with me very intensely instead. In some cases part of the illness is not realizing there's a problem. It's not always going to work to politely flag a behavior as off putting and they get it right away.
Such person is then not suitable for leadership position nor any position where communication matters. The way leaders interact trickle down and creates culture. People mimic leaders more then we care to admit.
And when you put such person in position where women have choice between leaving and being undermined by his behavior or being insulted or have to work around potential danger to reputation etc or what it is that he was doing, you are in fact disadvantaging women in that organization. You dont get to claim there is no sexism here nor claim that it is all meritocracy nor fair nor babble about natural self selection.
It makes not just women leave, it makes men who dont care about being members of such culture to leave.
For the record, a person that mistreats males would be same case.
I don't think what you've written is in conflict with anything I said.
In the case of this person I am referring to, it's been rather self-selecting and he's not in any positions of authority. It's pretty different from Stallman's purported autism-spectrum behavior too.
But it's also important to note that with the right medications, people like the case I'm describing can do better. So I'd like to afford that, while we agree that people don't make great leaders, authorities, communicators in that state or condition, they don't necessarily get there by being bad or totally irredeemable people, help is available to them and we should hope that they find it and stay "on the wagon", to use a metaphor from somewhere else.
> they don't necessarily get there by being bad or totally irredeemable people, help is available to them and we should hope that they find it and stay "on the wagon", to use a metaphor from somewhere else.
I agree with that and I did worked with people who are on the spectrum.
My pet peeve in these discussion is the argument that boils down to "he is autistic therefore everyone else should bend over and take whatever abuse that person unleashes on them and be understanding back". This argument is present up thread.
That does not work and just makes situation worst for everyone.
Was the argument about whether the behavior made people uncomfortable? Because I'm thinking that after 10, 20, 50 people told him that it did, it might sink in.
Well, with this topic I am getting far from Stallman, who if we assume is on the autistic spectrum is quite a bit different from my experiences with delusional people or psychotic disorders.
But if you've ever argued with a delusional person, they don't give up their beliefs easily. Frequently what happens is they'll turn it on you. So if I say, "you're making those women uncomfortable", he'll argue and say there is a problem with me, that I am too prudish or jealous of his romantic success. And they get very angry and obsessive about being confronted.
I don't know what it'd be like for 20 or 50 people to question these beliefs, but 10 definitely won't convince him. And with the nature of this complaint, a lot of time people are either too polite or too scared to tell him. It seems to me though, the best way to get it to sink in for him is an atypical antipsychotic.
I'm copy-pasting a comment from earlier on because I got late to that discussion and it's doubly relevant when the standard here has gone down from "hindered the work of MIT/FSF" to "made XX-class people uncomfortable".
--
I think the most interesting part of this gotterdamerung is the claim in “Remove Stallman appendix A” that if the work of a Great Genius hinders The work of some number of talented skilled folk, then society is ultimately at a loss.
I’m not certain that this is necessarily true. Or false for that matter. I have an intuition, possibly colored by an overall culture of hero worship, that it is false.
This is the rationale: the dynamics large groups of people inevitably approaches that of a committee. Committees are averaging devices that smooth potentially groundbreaking ideas out of serious consideration. Genius on the other hand is not only extraordinarily capable of such groundbreaking ideas but is able to insist on them doggedly.
OTOH it means that one true genius (and maybe Stallman isn’t one, but true geniuses have very very often been assholes) is worth almost an infinite number of merely talented folk.
The ultimate question: what lifted us from mere animal status 10-15K years ago? A handful of geniuses or a general society awakening?
But also; how may “young talented physicists” it takes to change a lightbulb?
The problem with your argument is that it implies that the people who were chased away from CSAIL, MIT or CS in general by people like Stallman were all planning to pile into a giant ineffective committee with each other and thus can be assumed to be No Great Loss, which is... a rather peculiar leap of logic.
There's no reason to suppose this. Even accepting your logic, the people he discouraged from CS might have wound up being highly effective solo contributors or worked in small teams.
I doubt he was the sole cause of someone leaving CSAIL or CS, but I've met plenty of women who were discouraged from CS by constant "weird dudes leering at my chest" or "constantly asking me for dates" etc. Based on the tales of his behavior the balance of probabilities are Not Good that he hasn't been at least partially responsible for some people deciding "well, maybe CS isn't for me".
Probably a general society awakening, my gut says to be honest with you. I think quality of life, progress, and stable economies/societies are ones that efficiently organize themselves into groups or orders.
So by that logic, if there was a group of mostly autistic/aspie men and they felt unsafe around one neurotypical woman, she should be the one to lose her position at a university, lose her position at a nonprofit that she founded, and be kicked out on the street, right?
"Feeling unsafe" is an absurd metric to use. Lots of things feel unsafe but are actually extremely safe. Many people feel unsafe flying on airplanes. Though they may not admit it publicly, lots of people feel unsafe around black men. Also, since one can't introspect another person's feelings, the metric of "feeling unsafe" is ripe for abuse. If you don't like someone, simply claim you feel unsafe around them. You can't reliably tell the difference between a liar and a fragile soul.
There is only one thing that generalizes: objective rules and encouraging people to be more understanding. And part of becoming more understanding involves growing a thicker skin. That's the only way that you can have a functioning community that includes communists, libertarians, young earth creationists, Muslims, Mormons, Quakers, atheists, pro-lifers, pro-choicers, Trump supporters, and Bernie supporters. We may not be able to converge on beliefs, but we can get along and work towards common causes. That is, provided that people in the group aren't catastrophizing and looking for any possible reason to be upset at one another.
Well, if she had a decades-long pattern of abusive and tasteless behavior towards people with less power than her, such that people went out of their way to avoid interacting with her at all, then yeah, I’d say hit the bricks.
You’re tilting at strawmen to get around the fact that Stallman can’t seem to control his inappropriate behavior. This isn’t a hypothetical, perfectly spherical, frictionless situation, this is documented patterns of behavior. Not that it should be necessary for understanding, but would you want to explain to your wife/daughter/sister/mother/aunt/any other woman in your life how a sign reading “Knight of Hot Ladies” is at all an appropriate thing to display in an office at MIT? Imagine being gay and Stallman had a sign that read “Knight of Bashing Homos”. Try to imagine how that would make you feel if you were gay.
People feel unsafe because he says the same things abusers say, and act the same way they act. Abusers don’t treat women like people or colleagues or equals, they treat them like objects. And, if I take the gold medal in mental gymnastics I can imagine years of Stallman not realizing that all of the stuff he says and does is harmful, but that doesn’t make it any less inappropriate.
The "hot ladies" photo was by someone who vandalized his sign and took a picture. He didn't do that. I looked around quite a bit, but I could not find a single instance of abusive behavior. No unwanted touching, no abuse of power, no coercion. I did find quite a few outright lies, such as John Gruber claiming that Stallman had an "open marriage" and "made overt sexual advances to women" while on the board of VA Linux.[1] Of course, Stallman has never been married and he was never on the board of VA Linux. There are many stories along those lines, and they've been repeated over and over despite being either unverifiable or verifiably false. You'd think that after 30 years of abuse, there would be a single person who would tell their story to a respected journalist (so that their report could be trusted while still having their identity protected). Hell, considering how famous Stallman is, you'd think one liar or crazy person would have tried this already. Still, nothing.
> if there was a group of mostly autistic/aspie men and they felt unsafe around one neurotypical woman, she should be the one to lose her position at a university
Yes, if her behaviour was not workplace appropriate.
That's a different question. None of the stories about Stallman are from coworkers. They are from people who shared meals with him, people who attended talks he gave, or people who went to his office. In his position at MIT, Stallman did not teach classes. Anyone who didn't like his behavior was free to tell him off and/or leave. They would suffer zero consequences to their career or schooling.
Also, I replied to someone who said, "If someone cannot handle social situations without making people feel unsafe they should not be in a leadership position." That commenter did not seem to care about whether the behavior was workplace appropriate; only about the feelings of some people who encountered Stallman. That was my point of contention: feelings are too subjective and too easily faked to justify what happened to Stallman.
One thing that has really annoyed me throughout this whole kerfuffle is how slippery the anti-Stallman arguments are. First people claimed he supported Epistein and child rape. Once those were revealed to be blatant lies, people fell back to anonymous emails claiming weird (but not coercive or harassing) behavior from decades ago. When none of those stories could be confirmed (and many of them were disconfirmed, such as the "hot ladies" photo and John Gruber's claims of "overt sexual advances to women"), people fell back to, "He made women feel unsafe." These claims of unsafe feelings lacked objective quantifiable behavior. I feel unsafe around my CEO. It's possible that he could be having a bad day and fire me for no particular reason. Does that mean my CEO should be forced to step down from his position? I don't think so. In Stallman's case, there wasn't even a power differential. He had no influence on the livelihoods of those who felt creeped out by him.
Now you put forth the standard of acceptable workplace behavior in non-workplace environments. If that makes one guilty then none of us are innocent.
The fact that the arguments are so slippery makes me want to automatically disbelieve any new arguments that surface. The motivation of those attacking him obviously have nothing to do with the actual content of the arguments, they already know they want to unperson him, and are then going looking for reasons. The result is selection bias and vague criticisms that could be levelled at pretty much anyone if you had the motivation to dig deeply enough.
It's character assassination as a show of political strength, and as a warning to anyone else who does not submit completely to the narrative, that they will come after you. Well, warning received. I'll ramp up the pretending to be super woke in public. So will everyone else, and we will all know everyone else is pretending too, but there'll be nothing we can do about it because if we deviate from the narrative, most people will come after us to keep up the act in order to save themselves.
I'll be sure to only express opinions anonymously and in the privacy of the ballot box. The far left will keep wondering why it loses elections when everybody outwardly appears to agree with them, and will continue to fight to prevent anonymous forums, but tech will stay ahead of them . Note that Sarah Mei claims to be a die-hard contributor to open source, but has three github contributions in the last year. Yeah, these are not the people who are going to win the arms race when it comes to fighting this battle with technology.
I don't see how "overt sexual advances to women" is by itself bad behaviour anyway. Sure, the appropriateness depends on the situation, but humans by and large do have sexual desire, often of heterosexual orientation. Is phrasing the "overt sexual advances to women" implying that covert sexual advances are better?
This way of phrasing it makes it seem as though "overt sexual advances" would necessarily be unwelcome, or part of a behaviour profile that constitutes harassment.
He is? Working in CSAIL for years, I would never have guessed that he was autistic. The email threads are lost to me now, but I remember him being unyielding and obnoxiously dedicated to free software, but he never seemed unaware of social cues. He always struck me as a very good communicator - someone who understood exactly how obnoxious he was, he was just a true believer so he didn't really care.
IIRC, in a biography about him, his mother suggested that autism would certainly make sense given some of his childhood behavior. As far as I know, he doesn't have a formal diagnosis, but I'm hardly some expert on RMS.
>A December, 2001, Wired magazine article titled “The Geek Syndrome” paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome. In many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the Wired article are eerily similar to the ones offered by Lippman. Stallman also speculates about this. In the interview for a 2000 profile for the TorontoStar, Stallman said he wondered if he were “borderline autistic.”
>In recent years, Lippman says she has taken to reading books about autism and believes that such episodes were more than coincidental. “I do feel that Richard had some of the qualities of an autistic child,” she says. “I regret that so little was known about autism back then. ”Over time, however, Lippman says her son learned to adjust. By age seven, she says, her son had become fond of standing at the front window of subway trains, mapping out and memorizing the labyrinthian system of railroad tracks underneath the city.
>Watch the Stallman gaze for an extended period of time, and you will begin to notice a subtle change. What appears at first to be an attempt to intimidate or hypnotize reveals itself upon second and third viewing as a frustrated attempt to build and main-tain contact. If his personality has a touch or “shadow” of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome, a possibility that Stallman has entertained from time to time, his eyes certainly confirm the diagnosis. Even at their most high-beam level of intensity, they have a tendency to grow cloudy and distant, like the eyes of a wounded animal preparing to give up the ghost. My own first encounter
Twice exceptional individuals have especially frustrating lives. Their high intelligence masks their difficulties and then other people claim they are making excuses and not trying hard enough.
No one wants to cut any slack for a smart person with disabilities. They just want to double down on "Smart people are lazy, arrogant, over entitled asshats and you need to behave better!"
There are generally too few resources available for such people. Most resources help with one issue or the other (giftedness or disability), not both at the same time. Such resources are a poor fit for the needs of 2e people.
You make it sound as though autistic people are unable to learn appropriate social behavior. That is not only false, it does an extreme disservice to the entire community of people on the spectrum.
I'm not sure that interpretation accurately represents the abilities of someone on the spectrum that is able to do productive work in society. But regardless, not everyone with all disabilities are qualified for all jobs. In this case, whatever the cause of Stallman's unwillingness &/or inability to behave in a way that doesn't make people feel uncomfortable or bullied, it also makes him unsuitable for these leadership roles. While some of GNU & FSF can be laid at his feet, in many ways they became successful despite him, not because of him.
As a non-neurotypical person, I will have to honestly say that teaching autistic people ""appropriate"" social behavior is comparable to abuse, steaming from the unwillingness of neurotypical to accept something that is not them and consider logic above their feelings for once.
Autistic people do not actually interact in logical way. They are unaware of own emotions and unaware of other peoples emotions. Their behavior or opinions are not more logical nor more correct. Angry yelling autistic is as illogical as angry neurotypical. Just because autistic is totally convinced he or she is super right, does not make it so. Just because neurotypical do not share autistic preference does not make him illogical, does not make his code "objectively" shitty or crappy. It does not make non-autistic illogical to not keep same routine nor to unintentionally disrupt autistic routine. No matter how much autistic calls neurotypical doing something different as yesterday stupid or irrational.
I agree that neurotypical should accept autistic needs and personalities, but not to the point that they allow themselves to be bullied. And vice versa.
Autistic people do have feelings and react to them. Quite strongly. Autistic do get insulted too.
I think this is an undervalued and very important aspect in the whole discussion.
In the meantime a completely mentally disabled person is leading the country and attacking every imaginable person in the world for years and… nothing happens at all!
this is literally the "we need better mental health facilities because of gun violence" argument. the vast majority of autistic people do not behave like stallman. it's not a pass. if he's so fucking smart why didn't he figure out how to comport himself better amongst the normies?
Plainly spoken, he probably underestimated the mental abilities of his listeners and wasn't prepared for his statements to be misinterpreted in this way.
The other term people are using is "neuro-atypical". That might be a good phrase here. Whether its autism or not, its pretty clear there's a great deal of neuro-atypical happenings in that brain, and many of those clearly impinge upon his social abilities in a really extreme way. There is years of public evidence to support that (including the current crap-storm).
There's a lot of neuroatypical people who don't defend pedophilia or harass people. Don't make it an excuse, it ends up making you sound like you're saying all autistic people are harassing assholes who can't help being assholes. Which is patently untrue.
there's a large contingent of people on hn (in tech, in the world) that fetishize "logic" and believe it always trumps "feelings". i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form.
i too used to be quite fond of making completely dispassionate arguments about controversial things (race, gender, class, etc.) because i believed that the entire content of a thing was what i understood about it in my oh-so logical way. what i was missing was experience (and often context), which is not neatly captured by syllogisms and facts. e.g. ask the jews who's entitled to palestine. now ask the palestinians. there is no theorem prover that will enable you to resolve that one no matter how many historical facts you feed it because ultimately the significance of each fact is refracted through personal experience (i.e. feelings).
this was as a result of being young and arrogant. i had the luxury of dispassion because none of these things had affected me in any way - i was lacking in experience of the injustices of the world that can't be written down using a set of "objective" facts. in retrospect it's a shameful mistake to have made.
this kind of bullying with "logic" is abhorrent to me now, especially when coming from someone who abuses their "logical" authority ("i'm very logical at x so trust me when i reason about completely unrelated y"). i always do my best to fight that kind of fire with fire. i believe if you have abilities (oratory, "logical") your responsibility is to aid those that don't, that don't get the same kind of attention, room to speak, credence, that you do simply because what they've experienced can't be formalized.
The whole point of rational dispassionate discussion is exactly because everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion. Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme. I mean lets pretend its true. So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion. If a persons feelings trump logic and they cant have a level headed discussion because of that, then frankly they shouldn’t be treated as an adult, they should be treated like a child.
People are excellent rationalizers -- smart people especially. Basically smart people can use reason as a cudgel to win any debate -- not because they've actually constructed a good proof or considered all relevant evidence.
No two people share the same experience, therefore discussion is not possible, because one cannot share exactly the viewpoint of the other. That's the extreme on one end.
On the other end, we can only take "rational facts" into account. In order to do this, we must discard completely all personal experience, which is first of all actually impossible between two human beings sharing a discussion, and second of all, will transform both participants into what amounts to deterministic computers who will arrive at precisely the same outcome given the same input.
Now clearly if we are arriving at a shared conclusion between two people discussing a shared input, either extreme is impossible.
> everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion.
You don't have to "put them aside." You have to incorporate them into the reasoning. It's true that some people are petulant and try to end discussion with the "you can't know what it's like" meme, sometimes it's really just what it looks like: a plea to try and understand what it's like to be me, instead of the caricature of me I see being constructed.
Yeah, and that would necessarily be a bad thing if your only priority was pwning people with facts and logic. However, some people care more about things like being kind and getting along with others. Such people have to be willing to stop doing things that hurt others, even if they can't understand why those things are bad.
Eg. It's very hard to explain what gender dysphoria feels like. If a trans person isn't able to do this to your satisfaction, that doesn't mean that you can just go on misgendering them. It means you just have to take their word for it.
> Yeah, and that would necessarily be a bad thing if your only priority was pwning people with facts and logic.
I'm not interested in "pwning" anyone. But if someone says "this guy needs to be fired/resign" (which actually, in the rms case I kinda agree with), then they need to be able to articulate things in a manner that's not just "you're not from [some group] so you don't get it". It's just lazy and disrespectful to other people.
Sure. Agreed. But the entire point of the "you can't possibly know" is that they're saying the exact opposite. That it's a waste of time for them to explain anything to you because you are apparently incapable of human empathy.
Logic is great if you want to shoot a canon at the right target or design a circuit. But our current logical tools -- and especially that extremely simple set of 2000+ year old syllogisms designed by Aristotle to help him classify bugs that you're probably referring to when you say logic -- are not even a remotely good tool for analyzing anything that involves humans or society.
Maybe logic can be useful in the way you want it to be, but first you'll need to figure out how to serialize a person's entire life experience into some sort of sequence of symbols.
> Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme.
But you don't know what it is like, and logic alone cannot help you know what it is like, because the full range of human experience is not expressible is any extant logical system.
hell, you can't even beat SoTA object detection if you don't have tons of actual experience in the form of labelled data.
And object detection is trivial compared to "being a human".
Is it really so hard to believe that you need actual experience in order to really understand how someone experiences the world? Or that your experience might make certain completely true things seem false to you, in a way that would make others experience your view of the world as akin to that of a child?
> So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion.
Sometimes that's true, but very often it is not true at all.
Very often, conversations about social/political topics end exactly when someone refuses empathize and instead imposes what they view as "logical" based on their "obvious experience of the world". E.g., "being gay would make me feel bad, and no healthy person wants to feel bad, so therefore gay people must be somehow sick". Completely logical from the priors, but immediately ends the conversation because the speaker assumes their experience of being a human in society is the only valid one.
> If a persons feelings trump logic...
Try replacing "feelings" with "experience". And then consider all those annoying arguments where someone says "but A is of course true and A clearly implies B so B must be true!" Even though you can go out and verify -- with reproducible experiment -- that the earth is in fact really, really not flat. i.e., that B is false.
And look: in this case, logic does not matter! If you can check with experience that B is false, then you don't need to look through the chain of logical deductions that resulted in a derivation that B is true. When people say "logic doesn't matter", what they usually mean is "your conclusion is prime facie false based on how I experience the world"; not "I'm not a blind child, you're a blind child!"
This doesn't mean that there is no room for logic. It just means... when talking about topics that involve how other people experience the world, try walking in other people's shoes.
And if they come to different conclusions that you do when you try to empathize with them, consider that perhaps they're not just dumb children. Perhaps you're not using enough synthetic training data to really understand where they are coming from. Or even that you can't do this task of imagining the other person's experience with purely synthetic training data.
Logic is a bad tool for solving social and political problems. Empathy is a much better tool. Especially empathy grounded in the realization that even empathy isn't quite enough to really understand how other people experience life. Logic can sometimes help you empathize, or explain to yourself why you need to empathize, but logic is just a tool for thinking. And it's not even always the best tool.
I believe in human empathy so much that I think I'm capable of understanding a persons struggle even if I haven't directly been through what they've been through. Indeed I think almost all of us are capable of this, even if we don't practice it. I think the argument that you can only talk about things you have personal experience in is essentially a pessimistic view about human empathy.
There is a huge difference between empathy and experience. Ignoring that difference is an important failure of empathy. It's the confusion that lets you say that you believe in empathy while also literally infantilizing people who disagree with you.
Furthermore, realizing this gap exists is not synonymous with claiming that "you can only talk about things you have personal experience". Where in my above post do I say that?
There's actually a well-developed practice at holding discussions where people's feelings are deliberately included--marital or group counseling, integrative negotation, conflict resolution strategies, etc. Recognizing that people's feeling are always somewhat involved, we have the dialectical tools to work with them, because the purely dispassionate approach you believe is the sole path to truth is something that most learn, sooner or later, rarely works and rarely satisfies.
I'm amused that this very wise very true comment is downvoted on HN. 20 year old me would have downvoted it. 40 year old me recognizes it as obvious and has a divorce to show for it. There's no way 20 year old me would have believed 40 year old me, though.
This was very much my take on the comment. I also think that, if you're over 30 and don't look back on a lot of what you thought at 20 and cringe a bit, you're probably missing something. Same goes for being over 40 and looking back at 30, etc., etc.
what exactly was reductionist about my analogy? which features of the conflict did i reduce? is it not the case that both sides having contrary perspectives on many of the same objects facts? did i imply somewhere that i endorse one side or the other? (which i do but i haven't in any way let on which).
Not sure why you're being downvoted; I think you're exactly correct.
Certainly we can't discount logic, but praising logic as some sort of solution, while ignoring people's emotions, is a great way to be completely ineffective at, well, nearly everything.
> i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form.
Indeed, and that deserves some emphasis, I think. Applying "logic" to complex issues in real life is fraught with difficulties, because there aren't really any obviously and fully true premises to base logical arguments on in the first place, and a lot of common sense or "self-evident" inferences are either false or only weakly or unreliably true.
Experience and feelings encode a lot of implicit knowledge about how the world works. When someone makes a dispassionate "logical" argument, they essentially throw these heuristics away and instead work their way up from axioms. Which sounds good in theory, until you realize these axioms are simplistic assumptions that often fail. For example, you might base an economic theory upon the axiom that economic actors are rational. In reality, though, that's not true, and you'd be better off incorporating some of your personal experiences and feelings because they may give you an intuitive grasp of when to trust the axiom, and when not to.
Logical, dispassionate arguments are (not always, but often) like arguments about spherical cows. Sure, they are technically valid, but they rely on simplifying assumptions, sometimes to the point of uselessness. The people who do that have undue confidence in a lot of platitudes, which makes them blind to the fact they are building their arguments on sand.
Hell is sitting in a meeting where a consensus decision is reached that is demonstrably wrong, and everybody treats you like the asshole because your very real and verifiable reasons are making everyone else feel bad or stupid.
The worst thing when that inevitably fails, sometimes with loss of innocent life if stakes are high, you can't even feel good you were right. Being right is completely useless and pointless there.
I'm rather young, so I might be exactly the kind of person that you were.
I think it's right to shut up when "logic" hurts people's feelings AND there's nothing to gain from saying it, but when there's an injustice and we can at least try to fight back, I think the right thing to do is just saying the "logical" truth, even if people's feelings get hurt.
I don't mean to say that my view is always the correct one, but rather that there's some subjacent right, "logical" system that we should strive to discover and apply. My opinion is simply my best effort at trying to discover that subjacent truth.
You may find, as you age, that this viewpoint takes on nuance. Yes, we should root our world in scientific thinking. We should approach problems logically. We should make our decisions rationally. We should be efficient in how we allocate our resources.
But there are times when being human outweighs those interests. There are times when we should be deliberately inefficient because too much efficiency can cause harm. There are times when we need not investigate rigorously, because by picking apart someone we might do them harm. There are times when we should accept that there might not be a logical underpinning to a behavior, because we will never be capable of operating free from emotions.
And most importantly, there are times where you need not pursue a truth. That sometimes the quest to understand can be much more harmful than simply being present and accepting.
I used to be a hardline 'logic only, logic always, efficiency above all' person. I'd plan my routes to optimize path efficiency. My relationships left me scrutinizing every interaction, guessing at double meanings and challenging assertions by people. It was unbearable to be around me. I've had to learn that sometimes people want to engage with me in diving deep, sometimes people really hate doing that, and rarely it's for everyone's best interest to override those interests.
It’s not about disregarding uncomfortable truths, it’s recognizing that speaking truth in an uncomfortable way accomplishes very little. To get someone to change their behavior, you need to first show them that you understand their perspective, even if you disagree with it.
Otherwise, they’ll mentally dismiss your arguments as coming from a different tribe without really listening— emotions and group identity are very strong psycological forces, so you need to take them into account when crafting your own actions.
A nuanced response, but my main point is about self censorship, what does one do if ultimately their conclusion is contradictory to their opponents. Acquiesce to maintain the peace or state their claim? I personally will always back truth regardless of its comfort to the audience whoever they might be
Pragmatically, you will achieve less this way. Eventually, you will hit the limits of others tolerance for what they will perceive as arrogance.
Perhaps this is of little concern to you, but if you absolutely want to maximize your accomplishments, you must be sufficiently flexible so that when you do speak truth it carries weight and import.
> I think it's right to shut up when "logic" hurts people's feelings AND there's nothing to gain from saying it
Given that your logic train might inspire others to get more insight and work on expanding your argument - or refuting it - "nothing to gain" is something that never happens.
Why so black and white? OP’s saying that there are other things besides “logic” (which is often itself just masked “feelings” from someone unaware of their own biases) that are relevant to the problems of the world; not saying that logic altogether is abhorrent and shutting “all logical arguments that come their way” down.
You ought to inspect why you yourself are getting defensive over that statement.
I'm not getting defensive I'm pointing out an argument that stems from feelings and is only supported by feelings has no basis in discussion, since they are not axioms for discussion but subjective.
The OP starts out dismissing logical arguments and then pats himself on the back for seeing through the grand conspiracy of analytical thought.
Like it or not, feelings drive most people’s decisions. Even if you use only the most rigorous logic to come to your own conclusions, it’s naieve to expect that to sway other people. Making a logical argument connect with people on an emotional level is a hard but invaluable skill to learn.
Similarly, it’s often helpful to recognize that there’s some social currency to be gained by compromising on low-priority issues that you can spend to get people on board with your high-priority ones— people will pay more attention to the objections of someone who’s generally agreeable than someone who has a reputation of complaining about everything.
> I'm pointing out an argument that stems from feelings and is only supported by feelings has no basis in discussion.
Is this so? Let’s call the statement above P0.
Let’s start from first principles. A discussion is performed by agents (peer interlocutors, a speaker and its audience, etc). I believe we can make it an axiom of our discussion that there are at least two sentient agents involved. Assume two (A1 and A2), without loss of generality. Focus on one of them, A1.
A1 joins the discussion in pursuit of a goal G1, and for that purpose puts forward an argument, as does A2 in pursuit of G2. G1 and G2 might or might not be the same.
Lets not concern ourselves much with the mechanics of the argument, but with the goals and their relation to P0.
Focusing on A1 and G1, it its trivially true that if G1 involves convincing A2 of some fact F, then P0 is trivially false except in the specific case in which A2 is the sort of agent which can only be convinced by a purely logical argument.
Empirically, most humans are not such agents.
Unproven conjecture: No human is such an agent.
Empathic communication (communication relating to feelings) is known to be an effective tool in convincing human agents [1].
Therefore P0 is invalid, arguments based on feelings are likely to have a use in discussion when the goal is to convince.
Let’s, however, assume that G1 is the goal of the idealized logician, to “arrive at the truth, whatever it might be.” Two cases arise:
Either A1 holds all the facts and the means of reasoning required to arrive at the truth, in which case communication with A2 is unnecessary. Or else A1 requires information or processes from A2 to arrive at the truth.
In the later case, if G1 == G2, meaning both agents seek the truth as their primary (perhaps only) objective, and this remains true through the whole discussion, then P0 could apply, under those strengthened premises.
However, if the goal of A2 is not initially the pursuit of truth, or if G2 ever changes after becoming the pursuit of truth, then A1 must attempt persuasion on A2 to (re-)align their goals. This could benefit from an emotional argument.
And this is all assuming A1 has the pursuit of truth as its only goal, and not, say, a performative goal of showing its command of logic, at the expense of the optimal process for arriving cooperatively at the truth. It also assumes that persuasion from one agent might not be used to move the other closer to the truth, or more receptive to future logical arguments, which might be possible in situations where the agent’s internal process is not perfectly logical (consider e.g. the practice of psychotherapy).
As a side note, when the goal G1 is performative, an emotional argument can be cloaked in the language of logic, for example the argument put forward by A1 might on the surface be about the subject of discussion, while intending in truth to convey information about A1’s social standing, for example, to show off education or intelligence by means of elaborate language not otherwise needed to make the argument persuasive or logical (e.g. [2]).
Other possible goals include, e.g. the didactical, the parodical, or that of artistic expression.
p.s. By the way, the above throwaway comment is also a self-demonstrating example in another way. I wrote it only to make a point regarding the idea that "logical arguments are the only kind of worthwhile communication, talking based on feelings is incorrect/unacceptable". However, this still shows up in a thread about recent news involving RMS. This comment is neither pro or against RMS or the reasons for his resignation(s). I don't believe it will be read as either, but it certainly could be read in that context. Given part of the discussion is about reading the social cues, particularly during an emotionally charged topic of discussion... I do wonder if this is an example of what not to do (strategically)? And, if so, whether that is a good thing or not (normatively). Provided as food for thought, I have not arrived to an answer nor am I engaged in seeking one.
I don’t really want to discuss further, but after rereading OPs post I don’t really see how he’s making an argument exclusively supported by feelings that flatly dismisses logic as a tool for discussion. I encourage you to step away from this for some time, and calmly reread the comment later.
In particular, OP does not claim that logic is not a useful tool for discussion. OP seems to claim that it’s use to shut down important voices and experience that isn’t framed in those terms, by people who don’t have the power to be heard, allows those who do to deny those people inclusion into discussion. OP even says that he fights fire with fire, ie uses logic against logical people to try to bring those silenced people’s experiences into conversation.
I see your dismissal of OP’s argument, as an example of OP’s point. Not only does the “facts” your pointing out seem awfully defensive to a personal, emotional image of “logicalness” that OP’s point calls into question (ie your “facts” aren’t just “facts”), but the next step is to call for that line of thought to be dismissed entirely because it stands outside your personally invested framework.
Nor do I fundamentally agree that statements made from feelings have no place in discussion just because they aren’t framed in the same logical framework as the hyper rational people who shoot those types of statements down. People’s feelings are typically based on lived experience relevant to a topic and contain content that, while not neatly packaged into the cogent, easily digestible logical argument you’re looking for, remain informative for ethically ambiguous topics.
To tie it to the literal situation that Stallman has found himself in, he has made dispassionate arguments about things like children being able to consent to sexual encounters with adults. If you’re expecting an abused child to give you a well formed, logical argument for why those actions are or are not ethical, then you’ve found quite the exceptional victim. Otherwise, the lack of that argument effectively silences the child’s ability to convey the importance of their trauma, and empowers influential people like Stallman to make those hyper-rational arguments that ignore and actively erode those people’s legitimate experiences.
It’s the adults who listen to the incoherent pain of those children, who are able to have those children’s voices heard in discussion, and therein lies the value of listening to, not dismissing, “emotional” appeal in debate.
Stallman’s case is a very cut and dry example of the kind of dispassion that represents my take of OP’s post, about how excessive application of “logic” corrodes productive discussion. This doesn’t just happen to children, this happens to capable adults whose cultural backgrounds (non-Western bluntness? doesn’t speak your language?), or complicated circumstances (traumatized rape victim?) make speaking clearly, logically and dispassionately about an ethical issue difficult.
As someone with friends and family personally impacted by that conflict, I’d wager quite a few people care and think that resolving that geopolitical issue is very contributive to society.
~5 million people. how can you be so blithe as to completely discount the existence/experience of that many people. i challenge you to empathize with someone living there. truly imagine it and then tell me it's completely trivial.
His job, as the head of the FSF and GNU, was to represent those organizations to the public, which includes many people who don't know him. Being judged and vilified by people who don't know you is what happens to public figures.
If your behavior brings disrepute on the organizations you represent, you should let those organizations find different representatives. RMS was right to step down. He is still free to say whatever he wants as an individual without damaging the reputations of GNU and the FSF.
I agree. That's why I cancelled my recurring donations to the FSF after this debacle. There are other, more worthy causes than an organization which considers public opinion to be more important than integrity, an organization that essentially axes it's central figure because of some internet trolls.
The issue is that Stallman has been this way for decades -- he's always been outspoken, nitpicky, and aggressively libertarian -- and FSF has flourished under his sole leadership.
It's only in 2019 that internet culture and clickbait media have made it a "problem". To me, that is significantly more harmful than any of the wonky things RMS sometimes says.
I don't know or care much about Stallman and the situation, don't really have a dog in this fight. What I do know is that "It's been like this for decades" is never an appropriate defense.
Not "it's been like this" -- he, a human person, has been like this. In fact he's been voluntarily blogging his political thoughts for decades (which, again, in 2019 is an incredibly dangerous thing to do).
So the question is this: if he's had his outspoken opinions on controversial topics for decades, there's no evidence of his opinions actually causing any real tangible harm, and under his tenure the FSF has been a runaway success -- why is it an issue now?
> Being judged and vilified by people who don't know you is what happens to public figures
Nope.
I don't judge and vilify people that I don't know, I judge their opinions.
In this case Stallman's opinion were completely rational, he's been judged for who he is and his past, by people that didn't know him super charged by people who knew him and held a grudge against him.
It's called character assassination.
Or mob.
> If your behavior brings disrepute on the organizations you represent
Is the FSF stops bringing dispute, it becomes useless.
If FSF doesn't challenge the status quo or what's considered taboo, what is it good for?
It's not a marketing agency that need people to buy the product even if the product sucks, it's a no profit org that needs people believing in the cause, especially when it's hard.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That is against the site guidelines and destroys the curiosity that this site exists for, regardless of what you're fighting for or against.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.
I'm talking about your account history. It's against the site guidelines to use HN primarily for posting in political and ideological arguments. Would you please re-read them and not create accounts to break them with?
Imagine the world if Stallman had been excommunicated from tech after the first awkward/offensive interaction he had with someone.
I sure wouldn’t.
Tangentially: I better not see anyone here lionize Steve Jobs ever again, because he inflicted actual physical trauma on people. He didn’t just piss them off with his failure to recognize social cues.
>Many incidents have occurred, enough to demonstrate that they’re a trend rather than “the first” one-off.
Are people deliberately ignoring the fact that his guy is mentally ill? You're ascribing neurotypical social requirements to someone who is demonstrably not capable of them, and then acting surprised when he breaches said decorum.
>Please don’t use threats here; “I better not see anyone here [any action here]” has no place in this forum’s conversations.
Actually my comment seems well in line with the general tone of this thread - which is either intentionally misleading about what actually a happened or willfully arrogant and dismissive about how people who struggle with mental illness can respond to the modern sociopolitical environment and its "requirements".
“I better not see anyone here doing XYZ or else I’ll ABC” is the complete construction of the phrase you use.
In parenting, this phrase typically replaces ABC with “punish you”, “hit you”, “spank you”.
Your construction buries the implied violence of that phrase by leaving off the “or else”, but that does not resolve the inappropriateness of threatening “or else” on this forum.
I’m glad to see you enjoy policing language as much as Stallman’s detractors. Most would consider it “rude” to invent something out of thin air that was not actually said and ascribe “violence” of intent to it - but, again, seems right in line with this thread.
Is an explicit “I’d better not see XYZ or else ABC” worse than an implicit one? Consider an implicit "you better not have the same opinions as stallman or I will cancel you" for example.
If his logic didnt matter, shouldnt he be condemned for only being inappropriate or hostile? Yet it seems that his current reputation among the public at large is that of an actual paedophilia/rape apologist. Whether he actually was or not, this lack of concern for subtleties is the very reason why "societal censure" should only be the authority on matters relating to politeness and not criminality.
I disagree. Societal censure is appropriate on the topics you declare exempt. It is appropriate to fear censure and exile from your society when caught to simply be considering such activities, even if no criminal action is occurs. They are societally unacceptable. If his historical actions and present words lead others to be concerned that he’s an apologist, it is appropriate to react societally.
I'm not aware that practicing radical self-censorship for the sake of conformity is the current standard of social justice, and, as far as I can tell, numerous forms of injustice were at one point or another deemed socially acceptable.
Even justifiable concerns are just exactly that, justifiable concerns. If anything, it is the society that cannot behave however it wants but has an obligation to uphold justice. It needs to have a fair legal system as opposed to mob justice and to punish only genuine criminals as opposed to merely people with criminal reputation.
The thing is though, the outrage mob usually doesn't care about facts. Their outrage is always based on the heat of the moment. It even seems this mode has been spilling over into our justice system lately, which is a very unfortunate and a sad state of affairs.
And also, sometimes the mob is right. The mob is guilty of shooting first and asking questions later but in this case, just read what he said and wrote, the mob is both guilty and correct.
Umm.... absolutely not. These quotes (directly from his site) beg to differ:
> “I am sceptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”
> “There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children. Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realise they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That’s not willing participation, it’s imposed participation, a different issue.”
RMS isn't being "vilified," he's facing proper judgment for the stupid, ignorant, and disgusting things he's said.
You're missing the nuance of the language as selected. "I am skeptical" clearly prefaces a desire to be made aware of actual scientific evidence, to have the citations (references to the evidence) provided.
Further, you, and others who keep beating this dead horse, do not realize that it is part of a larger, ongoing, discussion in which (IIRC from prior HN threads), RMS had that skepticism resolved with knowledge by those who actually discussed the point, rather than bashing someone for asking "is this actually true; where is the evidence?"
The scientific method involves asking if assumptions are true. I can sympathize with the theory that a substantial quantity of __additional__ damage is caused by the reactions of others after such unfortunate experiences. RMS was making a supposition that might be studied. The phrasing is, as the article mentioned, rather without consideration for how others might receive such a statement.
I’ve known people like this, and people who assume that those people are making claims when they are in fact, asking questions, are projecting. Specifically, people who are unable to take questions at face value are often people who are good at using language that is in the form of a question to give commands or state claims (typical in politics for example.)
(For anyone that reading, no, my observation here is not making a claim about the justness of the treatment of RMS, if you can’t see that upon a re-read you too may be projecting.)
What a confusing sentence. Are you saying the people who at mischaracterizing observations as claims are doing so because they are projecting their own positions?
No, I'm saying that they themselves use questions as a way to direct or claim, and so, when they encounter a person asking a question that could be interpreted in that way, they project their own behavior onto that person even if the person has no ulterior purpose to the question.
For example, "Do you think we should fix this bug?" can be a directive from your boss to fix the bug if they are this kind of person. If you respond "I'm not sure, is it related to work I did?" could be interpreted as a claim that it's not related to work you did, vs an actual question. The best way to deal with this kind of thing if you are the questioner is to try to craft questions in a way that they are not able to be re-framed as non-questions, but its challenging to do so on the fly.
> RMS had that skepticism resolved with knowledge by those who actually discussed the point,
Except he keeps making the same point. He has not changed his mind about images of child sexual abuse. He now knows that these cause harm to the people shown in them, but he thinks censorship is worse than that harm.
And you're entirely missing the point. It doesn't matter if he has changed his mind.
He must know that child abuse is an emotive topic. He must understand that the emotion imposes an extra responsibility to be careful with the way he says things.
His point - that he isn't sure if child abuse is harmful or not - was very easy to find information about. There's a wide range of reputable sources that discuss the harms caused by images of child sexual abuse and by child abuse. Mostly, we have testimony from the abuse people themselves. This stuff is not hidden away, and it appears to have been persuasive to him. So he just didn't bother looking before he made his comments.
The blackface discussion isn't taboo, it's just been discussed to death and there's only one reasonable position. Google minstrel shows. The history of blackface is one of mocking black people. There is no way to "logically" argue that it isn't offensive because there are no facts to back up that claim.
Yeah, and often it comes from a place of skepticism, not from a place of trying to understand. And also from a place of laziness, where the skeptic expects the marginalized person to explain why the behavior or speech is harmful, and explain it in a way that is acceptable to the skeptic. All the while the understanding is a short Google search away.
The problem is it's selectively applied. I can just as easily argue that rap music as "harmful" and what they said were "terrible" things, and yet there is no public outrage over that. In western society, it seems, thugs are exempt from all the politically correct standards that the rest of us are expected to abide by.
Apart from rap just, really, really not at all being anywhere in the same ballpark, there are examples where rap music has undergone social scrutiny and changed as a result: Cop killing lyrics. I'm not saying they don't occur at all any more, but they're considered much less acceptable than in the 90's.
Maybe I've lost the line of thinking here. I thought we were talking about black face, and why people are offended by it. It's an offensive racial stereotype. I really don't see anything comparable about thugs. I'm not even clear on what you mean by thug outrage: is it that thugs exist? Is it media portrayal of thugs? Is it that thugs do or say bad things? I am honestly confused by this comparison.
My point is that "gangsta" rap music is every bit as offensive as blackface, perhaps even more. But outrage culture selectively applies the "harmful" argument to the latter, not the former. Nor do they make as a big deal of it.
Thanks for clarifying, I see where you're coming from now.
Between blackface and gangsta rap, there is a difference in kind: Black face is emblematic of society itself continuing the practice of dehumanizing a group of people that historically were dehumanized and stripped of all freedom. Gangsta rap represents something that is not nearly as systemic.
That's somewhat beside the point though. You touch on a relevant question: Even if many fewer people are offended, they are still offended. So the question is, should society not urge any action at all for offensive speech? Should no one feel any pressure to modify their behavior in some way? If you don't want to go to those extremes, then you have to draw the line somewhere. Currently society draws the line at racist content, specifically that aimed at traditionally downtrodden minority groups, and even more specifically, those minority groups that still experience significant bias.
Why does society draw the line where it does? My guess is because the scars there are not completely healed over, even if society has "recognized the error of its way". On other stereotypes we aren't as adamant. Irish, for example. We don't view the drunken Irishman stereotype with quite the same shock, probably in part because the institutionalized oppression (In the US) has been mostly dead and buried for a 100 years. In the UK & Australia however, the wounds are more fresh, and reference to derogatory Irish stereotypes are much more taboo.
That's an exception. Rap music is very prevalent in today's society, and almost all of the subject matter deals with rape, killing, and selling drugs. You basically had to go back to the '90s to find an example.
I did not have to go back to the 90s to find just this example; I picked it because it was a critique by a sitting U.S. president, something that is quite rare and notable in any era.
Critiques of rap music have been a not uncommon phenomenon in the years since:
It's ironic (or actually, fitting) that you claim "I had to go back to the 90s" to find an example, because your perception of rap music seems to be stuck in the 90s, back when it faced peak critique and backlash. That we see less such critique today does not indicate that rap music has gotten a pass, but rather, that rap music has softened since what you perceived it to be in the 90s.
I don't know all of the top rap songs in 2018, but I'm pretty comfortable asserting that the majority (nevermind "almost all") do not deal with "rape, killing, and selling drugs".
I linked above to this Eminem story, but it's worth re-mentioning here: Eminem's peak work had extremely controversial lyrics; today, he's ripped for being lukewarm and for using the f-----t word, which was definitely not as verboten as back in the 90s and early 2000s: https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/pride/8473186/eminem...
There are many ways to logically argue this. I myself find it very confusing, and I am even a bit skeptical that people who cry racism actually understand it themselves. The Canadian PM was just in a brownface scandal for wearing dark makeup as part of an Arabian themed costume party. Canada never had minstrel shows making fun of brown people, yet this was abhorrent racism that may cost him the election, for essentially paying homage with his costume. It now seems to be the case that any white person who darkens their skin for any reason is a racist, which is obviously absurd.
> RMS had that skepticism resolved with knowledge by those who actually discussed the point
Then he should directly comment on all of the statements on the subject he has made over the years [1], particularly since they still exist on his personal website in unedited form, and are easily linked. Honestly, he could easily go back and write an "Updated: I no longer think this because X. I held this idea for a long time because Y."
He hasn't done that. He's free not to do so if he chooses, though I think this is one of the things he needs to shore up if he is to recover his reputation. I had no knowledge of these quotes prior to this incident, and while I still support free software, I will look to other folks for leadership on the topic.
I don't think merely believing or giving credence to the people who know him, combined with observation, means that his vilification comes not at the hands of those who know him. It only followed from it. You may look for fault in those primary sources, but why separately attack the rest of the world for their opinions on the matter?
Also, for what it's worth, I think defending something somebody said by calling it an "unpopular opinion" is a really easy trope to fall into that makes your tone seem dismissive to the opposing viewpoint (the "popular" viewpoint).
I don't personally know Charles Manson, but I think he is definitely deserving of vilification.
Now, that doesn't mean that RMS (or anyone else) absolutely certainly deserves being vilified by people who don't know them, but the entire premise is false: knowing someone (personally, I assume is the implication?) is not a necessary condition for condemning their behavior.
I hadn't thought of that when writing it, but yeah, he probably might.
No one is claiming all his arguments are bad, or that all his arguments are framed poorly, or that all his arguments ignore how they could offend or hurt people. But some of them, arguably, do.
My qualm is with the term "vilified." It implies that he is being done undue harm - he's getting what he should be getting. He should not be in a leadership position.
Maybe... but isn't this idea worth questioning? There are loads of scenarios where we simply say, as a society, your discomfort with someone doesn't matter on balance, and you must deal with it. Such is the case with all the hot-button "isms" today.
Stigma's wrt. mental disorders haven't really gotten the same kind of love from the social justice movements, that other areas have.
>Having an unpopular opinion isn't grounds for "proper judgement"
why? i don't understand this. if he's entitled to his unpopular opinions why in the world isn't everyone else held to the same standard? i'm entitled to my unpopular opinion (at least on hn) that he's a socially inept idiot who shouldn't be in a public facing position. will i be spared downvotes and a slew of responses harassing me? i doubt it (it's already happened twice).
this has literally always been in the court of public opinion because guess what? he's not an engineer and we're not assessing the quality of his work here - we're assessing his ability to be a public persona.
Hasn't he since changed his mind about those things and apologized for it? If someone believes something bad, gets educated, and changes their point of view, isn't that a good thing?
One of those comments was in response to an article about Jimmy Savile[0]. Savile is estimated to have raped 589 children, including some as young as 8.
I am "healthily skeptical" about the moral compass of people who use serial child rapists as a springboard to questions about consent on the part of minors.
When were those posted? That they (and other similar comments) suddenly appearing out of nowhere makes me question their veracity. They represent a broader point of view - a set of values - that are quite distinct from the views that have been presented before.
> 05 June 2006 (Dutch paedophiles form political party)
> Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
> [Reference updated on 2018-04-25 because the old link was broken.]
> I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
> There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
> Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That's not willing participation, it's imposed participation, a different issue.
So people are not free to say things other people may find stupid or ignorant? What if I thought that your comment was stupid and ignorant and had some power over your job position? Should I use this power then?
But the judgment was not appropriate punishment for what he said. He said something you disagree with, so what? You should judge people more by their actions than any particular belief they have.
We want our public figures to be predictable. When we lived in small bands we knew the peoples our whole life and we could build a really good model of their thinking. Later when we had bigger polities, we did not have that much information about the leaders. Now we know all of what they say and do and any time - but what is reported are only the deviations from the expectations - in our perception they are not balanced by the whole daily predictable lifes. To be public figure now means to be a good actor, understand what the public thinks about you and constantly adjust your behaviour to fit in and never be caught on any deviation from the public figure image. Stallman is not good at adjusting behaviour. He is still pretty predictable in the geek culture - but for the wider public he is really weird.
And in particular this quote from another article:
"The perception of creepiness is a response to the ambiguity of threat. […] While they may not be overtly threatening, individuals who display unusual patterns of nonverbal behavior, odd emotional responses or highly distinctive physical characteristics are outside the norm, and by definition unpredictable." from https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.20...
My whole working life has bee
in organisations with a disproportionate number of atypical types, and by and large found it refreshing and tolerant compared the culture outside, often macho, ignorant and dumb. Defending RMS's predilections as stemming from being aspy or whatever is really insulting to a great many in the tech community.
Just one? Temple Grandin comes immediately to mind. In our field Bill Gates probably qualifies as high-functioning neuro-atypical. And then there's Richard Greenblatt who built the first Lisp machines that eventually became the counter-inspiration for RMS's whole career.
There's a rule: If Stallman is invited to speak at your conference under NO circumstances should you allow him to stay at your place, nor at the home of anyone you care about or even don't outright hate (ask Miguel de Icaza about it some time).
Why does that rule exist? Because he has, many times, shown up and refused to leave for weeks. He brings random flings back to your place. He refuses to shower or observe basic hygiene. He's the worst houseguest imaginable.
Hell, why did VA Linux send an email all female employees letting them know when Stallman would be visiting so they could work from home or make themselves scarce? For that matter, how many people (especially women) dropped out of MIT, moved to another major, or left the lab because of Stallman?
Why does Stallman feel entitled to abuse other people's hospitality? Why does he get to do as he pleases? Why are his feelings and his experiences the only ones that matter?
I think this has bearing on the current issues: Stallman has been protected by those around him. He was protected by Minsky early on. This taught him that he could do as he pleased without consequences. He was never forced to learn socially acceptable behavior.
You sometimes see the same thing with child stars or pampered celebrities: No one ever tells them "no". They never face real consequences for their actions. Everyone around them makes excuses, either because they look up to them or because they're the gravy train. Things escalate until a) they cross the line so badly they can't weasel out of it or b) some "straw that broke the camel's back" situation arises. In situation "a" the person is often confused and bewildered because they've done as they pleased for a very long time. They don't understand why the current situation should be different. In situation "b" people often focus on the trivialities of the current incident, ignoring everything that came before it.
Am I saying Stallman should have been run out on a rail early on? Not at all... but Minsky shouldn't have excused Stallman's behavior. The first time Stallman cornered a woman in an elevator at MIT and blocked her from leaving Minsky should have, at the least, sat him down and said "stop it or you are out". We do a great disservice by sweeping complaints under the rug or excusing "geniuses". Bad behavior doesn't usually magically clear up, it tends to get worse over time as people learn they are the chosen ones and won't be questioned.
Does Stallman deserve the hate he's getting as a result of some posts to an email list? I don't know.
Should Stallman have been kicked off the FSF board a long time ago? Absolutely.
> The first time Stallman cornered a woman in an elevator at MIT and blocked her from leaving
Is this a thing that happened or something you just thought up? I've talked to women who worked with Stallman at MIT and complained to me about ways he hit on them and they never mentioned anything like that.
> why did VA Linux send an email all female employees letting them know when Stallman would be visiting so they could work from home or make themselves scarce
[Citation needed]
> For that matter, how many people (especially women) dropped out of MIT, moved to another major, or left the lab because of Stallman?
I don't know? How many? I have an open mind on this issue. But can you even identify one specific person who fits this criteria?
> Because he has, many times, shown up and refused to leave for weeks
So, now we've reached the point where public figures are expected to resign over the crime of being a bad houseguest?
What's next? Accusations that Guido van Possum can't parallel park? Handwringing over Rob Pike's poor penmanship? Twitter threads collecting all the instances where Tim Berners-Lee was seen with food stuck between his teeth?
More and more the whole Stallman affair just seems like a desperate search for an ex-post facto justification. Like fire him first, then figure out the exact reason later.
Kind of meta, but I don’t think Hacker News downvotes are being used as intended in this thread. There are a lot of well constructed arguments exposed in a polite manner that are downvoted.
> I do not excuse Richard Stallman’s remarks, nor do I challenge the actions of both the MIT Media Lab and the FSF for terminating his positions with them.
It wasn't the Media Lab with which Richard had a position; it was MIT CSAIL.
So he should get to decide where is name is being mentioned? As if it wasn't enough that he's dictating which video streaming codec is used for his talks.
Dude has gone out of his way to make other people uncomfortable. I use singular they for my pronouns. He's so bothered by this that he goes out of his way to not only tell me I'm wrong for doing so, but to invent his own language for referring to folks who use gender neutral pronouns (which no one will understand, because it's not widely used).
I would certainly question whether I was welcome at an event where he was a speaker/key presenter. Even if I was told I was welcome, I suspect others would feel emboldened to antagonistically challenge my pronouns. To me, it makes sense that if he's causing people to consider not attending events or signing up for his causes, then he's maybe not the right 'perse' for the job.
I don't understand why his pronoun scheme is antagonistic. He still respects that you want gender neutral pronouns, he just won't use they because he thinks they has a standard plural meaning.
I don't understand why people have an obligation to use "they" specifically as long as they respect the gender neutral concept.
> I don't understand why people have an obligation to use "they" specifically as long as they respect the gender neutral concept.
The same reason we use people's names. Or their nicknames. Or their middle names sometimes. Or their stage names, noms de plume, or noms de guerre. When you are introduced to someone you expect to be spending some time around, you might ask them, "Do you prefer Henry or Hank? Charles or Chuck? William or Bill?" And if they say, "Actually, I use my middle name, David." you wouldn't immediately say, "I'll go ahead and use your full first name because it's an equally equivalent name for you, because I'm respecting the concept of you.
Culturally, we already accept a wide variety of markers for people in a host of different situations, and have generally settled on "it's polite to try and refer to people in the way they prefer."
To me, it's as if RMS had posted a blog post that said, "I propose we use only people's full and legal names when referring to them, because I believe that system works better."
- RMS's main reason for introducing "per, pers, ..." was to use them in written English; this was just his own weird solution to a problem that a lot of people have noticed in modern English, the lack of a good singular pronoun for "a person" in general, without referring to anyone in particular. Lots of people have come up with crazy ideas for this, not many people are passionate enough about their use of language to write long blog posts about them, but, well, rms isn't everyone.
- Using people's preferred names is a matter of common courtesy, and this has been the case pretty much for all time. People having preferred pronouns, in contrast, is relatively new, and even 50 years ago nobody would have been familiar with this idea. It would be charitable to not judge an older generation by the standards of the young when something is changing even within our lifetimes.
- Insisting on using only full names would be bizarre, but surely nobody would take that as a personal attack, because presumably nobody would feel "singled out" by this. I think if you want to know if RMS was trying to antagonize non-binary folks or if he was rather just being prickly and a little eccentric about language, you would need to look further than this one idea of his. As far as I know, he is rather progressive on these issues, and he also has a history of passionately advocating unusual word choices, almost none of which have caught on, so I would lean towards this being just another example of his eccentric opinions about language, rather than trying to antagonize anyone.
Nobody said he was trying to antagonize nonbinary people. The problem is how he responded when people told him he had.
People having preferred pronouns is a new idea in most English speaking cultures because intersex, transgender, and nonbinary identities are new ideas in most English speaking cultures. Stallman doesn't use an older generation's standard. He says we should respect other people's gender identities by using the appropriate pronouns.[1]
Many people felt singled out when Facebook insisted on full and legal names, for what it's worth.[2]
> "I propose we use only people's full and legal names when referring to them, because I believe that system works better."
Undoubtedly a weird, outsider view of things but I wouldn't advocate him being punished for doing so. Nor would I advocate for shaming him for choosing to use people's full names in daily conversation.
Disclaimer: I use they/them pronouns. As far as I’m concerned, there’s two ‘gender neutral concepts’, people who you don’t know the pronouns of, and people who explicitly use gender neutral pronouns. If he wanted to refer to people as per by default, I don’t care, you do you. But as soon as I tell someone that I go by they/them, I would absolutely expect them to respect that. By reading his article on pronouns, it sounds as though he likely would not do so.
Because one basic way of showing any respect at all for someone is calling them by their preferred name and pronouns. Refusing to do so suggests that you somehow know someone else better than they know themselves. If someone is that upset about it they can seethe elsewhere on their own time, but when interacting with someone, just use their preferred name/pronouns.
> Because one basic way of showing any respect at all for someone is calling them by their preferred name and pronouns
This argument makes no sense as before knowing you, I cannot know neither your name nor “preffered pronoun”.
I’m going to call you by the default pronouns defined for the default genders as established by millennia of biological and linguistic evolution.
Anyone demanding everyone else to deviate from those established norms for the sake of pleasing their “personal” pronouns, are simply holding unrealistic expectations, only serving to bring themselves down.
Sure, but I don’t really expect people to know how to refer to me before they meet me. Context provides some clues, and if they guessed then they’d probably be correct. “They/them” also works if in doubt. But presumably when you meet someone they’ll tell you what they want to be called (their name), and potentially their preferred pronouns. It’s more common in some circles than others, but all it requires is being a good listener and some humility. If you misgender someone by accident, it’s an honest mistake and that’s okay.
Because why wouldn't you? It's pretty minimal effort for something you want to express respect for.
I have no reason to think Stallman didn't support whatever gender people in whatever roles, he seems more like a gender nihilist than anything. But it's pretty weird to spend time arguing with people about what their own personal experience is and I can see why it would make someone uncomfortable and unwelcome. It's very intrusive.
It's the general pattern of Stallman going off on some obtuse point and making a mountain of out things you didn't even know were even mole-hills.
It's this exhausting, endless series of crusades against these utterly ridiculous things because of some kind of poorly defined principle.
Like history has decided hundreds of years ago that singular "they" is entirely appropriate, just as singular "you" is in common-use. Language changes. That's why we don't write "ye" any more, mostly because we decided to kick the letter þ (thorn, or "th") to the curb.
There are many third person pronouns that people have suggested that are not widely in use today, including singular they. Ze, zhe, per, zer, e, etc.
[1] have all been proposed at various points in time (and some have resurfaced in the past several years) and there are people who identify by these pronouns. If singular 'they' is valid, then so are they (plural, referring to the alternative third person gender neutral pronouns in this case).
So ... I probably shouldn't write anything here. Anyway, in the spirit of learning and communication and respectful dialogue ...
I think one of the tensions here is between people who think that providing one non-gendered pronoun is a sufficient individual vs. societal customization setting versus those who think that every(-ish) stated individual pronoun choice being mandatory is the appropriate and respectful customization setting.
I first started thinking about these issues not from a trans / non-binary / fluid direction, but from the point of view of removing unnecessary gendering when it was irrelevant to the situation under discussion. So, from that perspective a single unambiguous non-gendered pronoun seemed sufficient.
I wasn't looking at things in terms of providing people with fine-grained customization to express themselves.
I find the desire for fine-grained gender-expression customization in tension with the desire to de-emphasize gender. But I can also see how he/she/they sounds suspiciously like he/she/other(not normal) and could be interpreted as alienating or insulting.
I still don't really understand, but frankly I don't have much skin in the game.
I'm half and half white/black so I've never really felt the urge to identify with either. I identify as a tennis player or scientist or programmer.
We live in a society where these days lefties are not disadvantaged, although they were brutalized in the past, and I see no intense desire among lefties to identify as lefties. It makes me wonder whether, if we did not brutalize non cis-gender conforming people, would we see such intense desire for recognition and affirmation of fine-grained gender identity? But obviously we don't live in that world yet.
I may have offended someone here, but I hope it's clear from my care and tone that it's not from a place of disrespect, but one of unfamiliarity and desire to understand.
I actually do think there is too much focus on pronouns and gender, though for some people it is something that preoccupies a lot of their life for various reasons. I'd imagine a trans person is confronted with these issues frequently because they see their identity being questioned so frequently. I do think there is something to be said about how western society may inform the ways in which people that don't conform to traditional gender identities behave, but that's not particularly relevant to pronouns, I don't think.
With that being said, I think English is a language ill-suited for 'gender agency' because the gendered pronouns are third person and innately require other people to acknowledge your preferences. You're placing a burden on someone else to not only remember your preference in name, but also in your pronouns. To me this is what I find so troublesome about the whole affair since I typically prefer to avoid placing burdens on other people to accommodate me. I also think that third person pronouns exist to be convenient and that treating them as a second name makes it as inconvenient to use as a proper noun. If someone prefers singular they, I'm much more likely to just always refer to them properly because it requires less effort to think about the sentences I am saying/typing, albeit awkward to my ears.
In Japanese, there are gendered first person pronouns that allow a person to easily communicate this part of their identity. Those who identify with the male gender might say "boku" or "ore," while someone who identifies as a female might use "atashi." Those that don't identify with either could use "watashi," since it is gender neutral.
It doesn't place any unnecessary burden on other people. You get to communicate it yourself. You don't have to rely on other people to acknowledge your gender in their language, you can do it yourself.
As for the 'they' pronoun, Stallman is at least correct in that it does present itself with challenges that other pronouns don't face. Since it has a duality of meaning it can create a lot of confusion, particularly when it's in print since there are far less context clues usually. In fact I implicitly pointed this out in my original comment.
> I find the desire for fine-grained gender-expression customization in tension with the desire to de-emphasize gender.
I think a problem is the failure to distinguish between gender identity and externally imposed gender and gender stereotypes. Increasing range of expression and social recognition of gender identity is aligned with reducing and eliminating socially-imposed gender and gender stereotypes.
I met Mr Stallman only once, so I don't know him, but remembering this only encounter I feel that he is not one of those humans who wield power expertly. So he fell. I think this is like a putsch. We will see what happens with GNU the next ten years.
I don't mean to exculpate nor denounce him, just point out that he is different.
even if he is an asshole, he has the right to say what he wants. I sorta get FSF ditching him because linux is going corporate (which I am very much against). but MIT (and western schools in general) are no longer places where free speech is allowed and that is the greater atrocity.
MIT first needs to clean up the shit show they've allowed to foster in their midst with regards to taking funding from convicted rapists of adolescent girls first.
I met him around 2002 , he was nuts already . He says shit he would've gotten away in the early days of the internet but he doesn't now . He hasn't change much to be fair it's just now what he says gets echoed in social networks.
We are, sadly, entering a new age of conformity. Aligning yourself with what main stream society thinks is correct is now more important than anything else.
The response of course is that "bad behavior should never be excused, regardless of ability!" which leads to a losing argument in which we try to say what kind of good excuses what kind of bad. But this presupposes the conformist stance: that fitting in with the norms is the default behavior, and violations of it must be explained.
The Hacker culture from which everything we have today in tech arose. Which is the culture that Stallman arguably helped create. The culture which makes this site "Hacker" news, is one in which doing something interesting is more important than anything else. The presupposition from this more iconoclastic view is: why aren't you doing something interesting? Adhering to norms because it's the "safe" thing to do is the true aberrant behavior.
It's a shame too since now of all points in human history we need more radical thinkers and people who are willing to question the status quo, which btw is inherently unsustainable. But maybe it's this fear that leads us rushing back to deep moral systems likes religious fantastics when their faith is questioned.
Yes there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. Stallman was viewed as a toxic individual who caused harm, and this is what our society is trying to weed out.
I still believe, perhaps naively, that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you. And this is something that everyone needs to do, whether you're in the majority or the minority.
Social progress involves making-acceptable things that were previously offensive and outrageous to the majority. Things that were considered harmful to society. Things like equal rights for women, minorities, different sexualities.
For progress to be possible, people must be able to say offensive things that others find unpleasant.
You might say, but it’s not those kinds of “harmful” views we want to stop, only the genuinely harmful ones. But who gets to decide which views are harmful?
On a different note, I think that, for creativity, it’s important to be able to think and express yourself without always needing to second guess yourself. And I think we’re creating a society where everyone has to always second guess everything they think and say in case they accidentally say something that may bring in the outrage mob, either now or at some point anywhere potentially years later.
> for creativity, it’s important to be able to think and express yourself without always needing to second guess yourself. And I think we’re creating a society where everyone has to always second guess everything they think and say in case they accidentally say something that may bring in the outrage mob
It's funny you should say this. This is one of the defining traits of Stallman in my memory. He would go out of his way to get loudly outraged about relatively trivial things that others would do. Email out asking for responses to a survey and reward people with Amazon gift cards? He would attack you for supporting the evil corporation Amazon, often derailing the original thread. Share an interesting article/webpage/project? He would attack you for not offering a javascript-free option. Set up a video-based experiment in the lab? Better make sure Stallman doesn't see that camera and disable it/make a huge scene about his privacy being infringed upon.
I've finding it hard to understand what sort of progress is reached by, say, enabling weird dudes to constantly and inappropriately hit on women.
Suppose there is some future society that has decided that weird stinky dudes that make inappropriate remarks, stare at women's tits and compulsively hit on attractive women who are just trying to exist in a professional setting are actually A-OK. Why is that society's alleged values superior to our own?
If we are trending towards a direction that makes what we now regard as sexual harassment ok (again) then I would say we're going in the wrong way, and there's no more reason to regard that hypothetical futures' values as better than ours, any more than we regard the 1950s values better now.
This doesn't remotely analogize to "gay rights" or racial tolerance, etc. Being enraged/uncomfortable about, say, interracial marriage or consensual gay relationships was always a matter of people becoming involved in things that were none of their damn business (e.g. "I'm angry about what those gays are doing behind closed doors") or denying them to right to participate in society as equals. Not liking stuff like sexual harassment is something we do because of its effect on the person involved (e.g. "it's hard to be taken seriously as a professional and feel that I have dignity when Stallman makes remarks about my virginity and stares at my tits") or others like them.
IMO second guessing what you think (?) and say is hardly all that difficult. People could go a long way by (a) being kind and (b) acting (shock horror) professional in a professional context and not trying to use the workplace to get dates or get laid, and (c) shutting the hell up once in a while rather than treating us to their opinions about Every Goddamn Thing. Honestly, the sheer egomania of Stallman deciding the whole world needed to hear his thoughts on underage sex is pretty wild.
The argument isn't that enabling weird dudes to inappropriately hit on women is the progress we are after, that is a complete misunderstanding of the point.
The argument is that often renegade and maverick thinkers are deeply deeply flawed on an individual level and would do stuff like that. This doesn't really fit well into the "progress category" of civil rights, it's more about advances in technology.
TBH I don't know jack about Richard Stallman, but my understanding is he played a huge role in developing the idea of free software which has had enormous benefit to the world in general.
The question is does the benefit the ideas and works of Richard Stallman have brought warrant the personal costs he has imposed on many people around him? And in the future, are the potential personal costs another Richard Stallman would bring worth the advances they could bring in another area?
To put it even more bluntly, will it be possible to have the types of significant progress we desire in technology or what area, while excluding people who on a more personal level we find deeply problematic? Can the best parts of a Richard Stallman or Steve Jobs be separated from the worst parts? Can we in a sense "sanitise" progress so that only people we find socially acceptable are the ones who will do it? What if the people who will do most for humanity's collective properity are (a) assholes (b) unprofessional, and (c) never the shut the hell up about stuff they know nothing about?
I don't have an answer here, but it is going to be an issue worth thinking about going into the future.
I'm not sure that the entire careers of a Stallman or a Jobs are inseparable from them acting like dickheads at some point in their career.
It may be the case that having "Future Stallman" or "Future Jobs" be persuaded to rein in their excesses (rather than being tolerated and encouraged to be raging assholes, at least in some contexts and ways) might be of benefit both to the people around them, but also, the talented individuals themselves.
Maybe we can apply discussions of "the soft bigotry of low expectations" also to badly behaved white middle class people too, and they could do better?
First of all, this is bullshit. There are plenty of perfectly agreeable people in computing who have had massive impact. I've met Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, for example, and both were kind and pleasant people. I don't recall hearing that Berners-Lee is anything but pleasant. While there are plenty of disagreeable sorts (I hear Dijkstra was a bit of a Djick) there is by no means a hard and fast rule that those who change the status quo of technology are dickheads. And some of the people who were neurotic aren't necessarily bad to other people, and historically, it's easy to point to some people who might have had much saner lives but for the times they lived in (Alan Turing).
Second, even the people like Jobs and Stallman can moderate their toxic behavior towards other people if incentives are in place. That doesn't mean that they will be normal. They will almost certainly continue to be rude, abrupt, and a little weird. They don't have to be nice.
There's something bizarrely fetishistic about the assumption that letting people like Jobs and Stallman do whatever they want is essential to their success. It's like Delilah cutting Samson's hair and taking away his strength.
Thompson and Ritchie were technical pioneers but weren't philosophical pioneers. Their work was entirely about implementing technical solutions, it had nothing to do with the philosophical structure within which those solutions were made.
Jobs and Stallman were different. They had strong and assertive views about how technology "should" be, not just how things would get done.
Jobs was all about accessible, easy to use, and sexy being important to technology.
Stallman is all about resisting the influence on corporate and governmental interests on the development of software.
I mean look at this list of suggestions Stallman made to Microsoft. https://mspoweruser.com/richard-stallmans-10-suggestions-to-... This is entirely about the philosophy of how computer software development should occur, not really anything to do with the technical aspects of it.
Richard Stallman sounds like a bit of a paranoid nutter. Is it safe to assume that his paranoia and personal idiosyncrasies can be separated from his philosophical views of the world (many of which are fundamentally about empowering the individual technology user against corporate and governmental interests which many of us agree with)? The jury is out on that one imo. He has seeded his ideas successfully and now they permeate the culture so perhaps he as an individual is no longer necessary to the movement.
But what about the next Stallman? A man or woman with a vision of how the world should or could be that is informed by their personal flaws? Will they be determined as to problematic to be involved in the industry and we will lose out on a unique way of looking at the world that would leave as all better off? I don't know. None of us do. It's an open question.
> I've finding it hard to understand what sort of progress is reached by, say, enabling weird dudes to constantly and inappropriately hit on women.
I was reponding to these statements "there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. ... I still believe ... that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you.". This is clearly talking about all cases where there's potential for causing hurt and pain, not the one specific case you're talking about.
You didn't address one of the main points in my comment: who gets to decide which views are harmful?
And when I talked about social progress, I didn't just mean that which has already occurred. There are things which are today considered offensive and harmful, that in the future will be considered just and good. This has always been the case, for any moment in time. If we decide it's important to shut down all offensive speech, it makes it much harder for society to evolve and improve.
You're looking for a neutral principle that doesn't exist. Why is the trajectory of society towards "evolving and improving" assumed here? Why is someone's view of what is "just and good" in the future automatically better? What if we wind up in a dystopia and reintroduce slavery? Is that automatically "better" because it's out there in the future?
At this point people usually go looking for a get out of jail free card where they can conjure up a neutral principle and say "no, I meant progress towards good things", which of course "begs the question" in the classic sense.
The principle I'm arguing for does not involve any specific view of what "better" is.
A norm of shutting down someone whenever a number of people consider that person's views or actions to be offensive or harmful will stifle change. It will stifle all change and evolution of norms and beliefs. It's an authoritarian impulse that will only ratchet up restrictions on what can be said and done.
If such a norm had been in place in the last few hundred years, it would have severely hampered all the past changes that are now widely agreed to have been good things.
I think you've 100% missed the point here, but it's late, and I can't channel any more of Stanley Fish's "The Trouble with Principle" (very recommended, and readable) at this hour.
I'd remind you that this subthread is all under my response to a comment which said "there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. ... I still believe ... that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you.".
If it was the government censoring you from saying those "harmful" things I would agree with you. Who gets to decide is society, and it's responding loud and clear to this issue.
This flattening needs to stop. RMS didn't harm anyone, he stated odious opinions most people disagree with. There is, in addition to the email thread, accusations of past toxic behavior. The article these comments are attached to dispute that or at least suggest that it may in part be due to him being neuroatypical. In fact, it directly disputes one of those anecdotes regarding a sexual joke attached to his door. This aside, I've heard enough he-said-she-said-they-said to feel like I really don't know the full story wrt actually toxic behavior beyond rms merely being unpleasant and pedantic, and it probably isn't fair at this point to make a call on it.
I'll repeat what I said above, this is why his ouster should have been through a fair hearing rather than in a hurried response to public intrigue.
no, that's not how he "was" viewed by those on the outside, at least; that's incredibly unfair and ignores the mountains of progress he fought and sacrificed for for many decades.
i cannot think of a more principled and consistent individual in the realm of technology than RMS, nor someone who's actually completely trustworthy in this day and age. in the tech sphere his logic was talmudic as far as i can tell: not only that, but his principles probably cost him millions of dollars or more - whatever some BigCorp could pay him to shut the hell up, or buy/relicense GCC, or whatever.
honestly, it's a miracle that everything isn't completely proprietary already. that RMS and others were able to hold that line, to the extent that they did, against the money their enemies had, was nothing short of heroic.
who is next in line? who else can you trust in a world of selling every morsel of data, invading every possible private nook of our lives still remaining? i really can't think of anyone off the top of my head. unfortunately, that means we'll probably even faster acceleration of proprietary crapware added in to various devices.
that he's insufferable or whatever in person is regrettable, but one cannot merely ignore the insanely principled views he espoused, contributions he made, and rights he defended for the sake of anyone consuming technology today.
I’m not informed enough to make a judgement either way with regards to Stallman, but someone can be principled and trustworthy in one realm and inappropriate and harmful in another.
Just because I volunteer at a shelter and help people there doesn’t mean I get pass for bad behavior else where.
> Yes there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw.
I'm trying to keep an open-mind here. But can anyone cite specific examples of a person that Stallman hurt in some way or another? And I'm willing to take a very liberal definition for "hurt" here.
Because Stallman's "toxicity" keeps getting brought up again and again. Yet no specific instances are being cited besides vague rumors, anonymous claims, or "you know it, I know it, everybody knows it" type allusions.
So, it's just a simple request. Any actual, specific, non-anonymous claim of somebody being hurt by Richard Stallman in some identifiable way. (For example Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey would have no trouble meeting this criteria.) Maybe, I'm just out of the loop, but I'm certainly seeing a repeated pattern or allusions without specifics in these threads.
There is a sexual harassment allegation from 1985:
>>>When I was a teen freshman, I went to a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant in Central Square with a graduate student friend and others from the AI lab. I don't know if he and I were the last two left, but at a table with only the two of us, Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he'd kill himself if I didn't go out with him.
I felt bad for him and also uncomfortable and manipulated. I did not like being put in that position — suddenly responsible for an "important" man. What had I done to get into this situation? I decided I could not be responsible for his living or dying, and would have to accept him killing himself. I declined further contact.
He was not a man of his word or he'd be long dead.
Betsy S., Bachelor's in Management Science, '85<<<
I have seen in this very same thread other people saying there are accusations, but that the people in question do not want to come forward.
Another secondhand (third-hand?) accusation of sexual harassment:
>>>He made overt sexual advances to women at work [in the late 1990s at VA Linux]. One young woman who worked next to me was so upset from his multiple advances that she took it to senior management. She was able to deal with the problem without taking the issue outside the company. I don’t know the details, but she was given advanced warning anytime Stallman was headed over so that she could leave.<<<
Personally, I still stay it was a witch hunt to force Stallman to resign, but if there were substantial sexual harassment allegations from this century [1] and a reasonably fair hearing, I would consider it fair to make him go.
[1] This will make me a heretic among some #MeToo advocates, but I think sexual harassment allegations need to have a reasonable statue of limitations. I don’t think people should be dragged through the mud for something they did 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years ago. [2] [3] [4]
[2] Tom Brokaw was dragged through the mud for allegedly sexually harassing two women over 20 years ago, as well as trying to kiss a woman (who was not his wife, but that bit doesn’t generally matter with the #MeToo crowd) over 50 years ago.
[3] Nolan Bushnell was dragged through the mud for supposedly having a hostile work environment at Atari over 40 years ago, but not one women who worked at Atari when Bushnell led it has come forward to complain, and multiple women who were there, including Loni Reeder, came forward and said Bushnell was very kind and inclusive towards women.
[4] Within reason. Many jurisdictions do not have a statute of limitations for rape; but asking someone out on a date when they are not interested is very different from sexual assault.
> > Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he'd kill himself if I didn't go out with him.
> I declined further contact.
This is not sexual harassment, there is no allegation, it was never filed.
This story was never confirmed, BTW.
But even if it happened, what's so bad about it?
That he's weird?
When it happened to me I offered support, I did not go to the police.
> but that the people in question do not want to come forward.
Stallman is not a well know powerful man that could pose a real danger to anybody.
He's not an Epstein that traffic girls.
> He made overt sexual advances to women at work [in the late 1990s at VA Linux
Who didn't in the 90s?
There were literally cocaine addicts running companies, snorting from their desks at the 24th floor in Manhattan and we are talking about Stallman making an alleged third hand advance?
Of course him being him, not Brad Pitt, and coming out weird when he tries to be friendly, scared women away.
Meanwhile the like of Epstein trafficked girls and were considered "highly respectable business men" because they dressed sharply, were good looking and moved a ton of money, the kind of money that could buy you an island.
While Stallman slept on a matress in his office .
It is hard to recall how bad the 90s were for those who never lived them, how bad the influence of the new born "global style industry" was and how not conforming to some social norm made you automatically an outcast.
There were movies like "Thrashin'" were the best skaters in the world (Caballero, Tony Hawk, Tony Alva) played the bad boys and the good guy of the time was Josh Brolin [1]
Now think about Josh Brolin in the 90s, the epitome of what a man should be according to showbiz industry targeting young people, and imagine being Richard Matthew Stallman.
Hell, there were even movies about nerds and they were all depicted as ugly, mean and with a bad hygiene.
Without a doubt Stallman has done several magnitudes of more good for society than harm -- from what I can tell the "harm" is mostly him being just a weird, semi-insufferable dude in a field of weird, semi-insufferable people.
> "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw
Let's say then, if we want to enforce some kind of hard limit on what other people are allowed to do or not to do (and even on the kind of people they want to be), that there must be objective and shared ways to establish harm. It cannot be sufficient for someone to say "I felt harmed" to exclude someone else from society (because this what being silenced and removed from one's job means). And we need to have the courage to doubt those who claim they've felt harmed, and to draw a line between tolerable and intolerable amounts of harm (as every action can end up harming somebody, even slightly).
Turns out that laws do precisely this, and define harm in objective ways that allow society to agreee on behaviours that should be punished without limiting personal liberty in arbitrary ways.
Saying Stallman did hurt others in the context of all the work he did isn't just naive in my opinion. Try to weed out people from your society if that is your calling, but don't be surprised if people want to weed out you.
>I still believe, perhaps naively, that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you. And this is something that everyone needs to do, whether you're in the majority or the minority.
At issue, negative beliefs are postulated to be the cause of social ills such as racism and sexism. Therefore, what Richard Stallman believes is the core objection, because simply holding a belief is now viewed as the root of injustice. To wit, you see, again and again, attempts to claim moral credit from the leveling the assertion that Richard Stallman is a toxic asshole guilty of no particular crime, but instead an accrued debt of micro-aggressions that together represent a pattern of behavior unambiguously identifying his as a thought criminal.
Seriously. He once messed up a hotel room, and had a sign on his office door, and clumsily asked someone on a date. From this we know that he has harmful opinions.
If it were just any one of these things, perhaps there'd be some room left to think it's all a misunderstanding, to wonder if he doesn't actually believe this or that... which we must indecently rush to exclaim that we certainly do not also believe! oh no! I, for one, think stigmatizing people for their beliefs is wrong, which is why I have never messed up a hotel room or caused anybody pain! Cancel RMS!
It is extremely painful dealing with this level of dishonesty. Perhaps RMS's thoughts on free software are more relevant than his opinions on other things, and we should ignore his thoughts on the age of consent, because, if we don't, we're going to find that there has never once been a good idea from a mind that did not also harbor bad ideas.
If you're gonna get that salty about "manliness", it's probably good form to use your actual account. You know. To be manly, while you're calling people sick for having a bit of decency to them.
> I still believe, perhaps naively, that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you. And this is something that everyone needs to do, whether you're in the majority or the minority.
It sure is. By shutting up and never speaking your opinions or thoughts to anyone. That's what you and half the people on this thread are advocating for. That people should only share opinions that the rest of society agrees with lest someone somewhere be offended. As if to be offended is to be physically harmed. Otherwise, should one dare to speak, one should be fired and ostracized. Frankly, that's one sick and boring society that's will produce little to nothing of value. Who knows what other voices will be silenced by this kind of censorship? No one will know because in this society of self censorship, people will be too afraid to voice any kind of opinion. That's the type of place America is becoming and the type of society it is trying to export to the rest of the world. Having lived in a society where the vast majority were afraid of speaking anything against the norms, I can tell you it was a horrible place, full of fear with little room for creativity or advancement of any sort. Yet here in America, where one is protected from the government, this growing movement of censorship is created by the people themselves, as if in the absence of government censorship, many Americans take it upon themselves to create an institution of censorship to prevent any and all discourse, creative thought, and advancement. They do the censorship for the government the government can't do for itself.
Ironic and ugly this society that has been created. So much for freedom. Whatever little freedom the government has left to the people, the people here are choosing to take it away from themselves. All so someone somewhere doesn't get offended. Of course, someone will always be offended. That's what great writers and thinkers and inventors and creators do: they offend. When you lose that, you lose all innovation and even the ability to think critically about anything. You end up with a conformist monoculture that cannot fathom of anything different. So much for diversity.
> The Hacker culture from which everything we have today in tech arose. Which is the culture that Stallman arguably helped create. The culture whic h makes this site "Hacker" news, is one in which doing something interesting is more important than anything else.
Doing something interesting has never been more important than doing "anything else" in hacker culture as I have understood it, RMS's own motivation has always been grounded in a moral and ethical roots.
One should honour his commitment to freedom above all else.
> We are, sadly, entering a new age of conformity. Aligning yourself with what main stream society thinks is correct is now more important than anything else.
I think the opposite conclusion is true. Society is entering a world of nonconformity with a very few exceptions. The problem is those few exceptions will absolutely ruin your life.
Any other period in human history you will find drastically more conformity. Just go back a few decades. Tattoos? Facial hair? Casual clothing? Female? Person of color? Openly not heterosexual, or not married and monogamous for that matter? Not a white male landowner? Don't show up to church every Sunday?
The further back you go in time, the more and more conformity was expected for those who wanted a good job or a position of power. Today is the least conformist society has been throughout history.
With a few exceptions. And those exceptions are ill defined and irrationally punished. And unfortunately for RMS, an email in support of an associate of Epstein was one of those exceptions.
It's the age of auto-censure. Now everybody should go around the office, the school and life wearing nice people masks, avoiding to express anything that's near controversial.
The punishment? Public embarrassment and shaming, in the present or the possible future for things said in the past.
Who are the winners? Workplace owners. They are tired of dealing with HR issues and project instabilities for the gossip and drama derived from a controversial opinion or act.
Of course, there are serious incidents (like physical violence or other) but now the level was brought so low that simply saying a bad word can give you a life sentence.
Unfortunately, there is no room for radical thinkers.
We have always been in an "age of conformity". For example, Obergefell v. Hodges was decided less than 5 years ago. There are still children who are homeless because they aren't sexually conformant.
What is changing is not the degree to which society demands conformity. All that is change is who has to conform, and the standards to which they have to conform.
Conformity is not bad. Abstaining from wanton murder and theft is conforming to social norms. What matters is whether the norms are good ones.
> The Hacker culture from which everything we have today in tech arose.
This is a nice origin fantasy, but it's really not true.
The uniforms at DoD and the suits at IBM/Intel/AT&T/Xerox/etc. played a huge role in envisioning, organizing, and bankrolling all that work.
Also, that work was done by of hundreds of thousands of white-collar and blue-collar professionals. Many of those engineers and technicians were not self-described "hackers" or "nerds". A lot of them contributed by digging ditches and climbing polls. A lot of them were brilliant engineers who at 5pm turned off the computer screen, went home to their families, and didn't think about work until 9am the next day.
> The culture which makes this site "Hacker" news, is one in which doing something interesting is more important than anything else... why aren't you doing something interesting?
Because some times boring things are important to help society function or to make money. Examples: Attending city council/school board meetings. Being a middle man. Running warehouses. Selling advertisements. Giving away vaccines and moz nets. And honestly 99% of other work done by companies, nonprofits, and active citizens. Including software companies. Boring, not interesting, and yet to varying degrees important. In fact, some of those things are super interesting (ad auctions, for example, are wonderful fun for math nerds) but not nearly as important as the boring things (passing out vaccines or setting up moz nets or taking minutes at a city council meeting -- seriously, not fun).
> But maybe it's this fear that leads us rushing back to deep moral systems likes religious fantastics when their faith is questioned.
We all have our convictions and stories in which we find meaning.
We're all unreasonable defensive about those stories we tell ourselves.
...In fact, on that note, one more thing to add to the list of boring things that we for some reason feel the need to do: political arguments on a news forum that financially benefits VC by tapping into a fantastical ethos about the origin of modern computing.
Now, tell me no one here is going to get unreasonably defensive about that ;-)
Sending the country through impeachment for a recording about President Trump grabbing women's vaginas is different from organizations evicting Richard Stallman. It is a difference of magnitude.
I question a fundamental assumption here: that Stallman was let go or pushed to resign because of "SJWs."
I don't see much evidence of that. "SJWs" have had problems with him for years and nothing happened... until now.
What's different this time? Stallman's comments on Epstein added to the embarrassment of MIT. He waded into a political bonfire and added fuel. The last thing MIT needs is someone affiliated with MIT with a history of (at least sounding like he was) defending pedophilia holding forth on the Epstein saga in any way whatsoever, let alone by apologizing for or at least minimizing his actions.
This time he embarrassed and offended much more powerful people.
What he intended to do doesn't matter. That's not my point. What matters is that his words could be interpreted that way and that he was affiliated with MIT.
This is not only untrue, this is the direct opposite of what said:
> (Now) Labor Secretary Acosta's plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein was not only extremely lenient, it was so lenient that it was illegal. I wonder whether this makes it possible to resentence him to a longer prison term. I disagree with some of what the article says about Epstein. Epstein is not, apparently, a pedophile, since the people he raped seem to have all been postpuberal. By contrast, calling him a "sex offender" tends to minimize his crimes, since it groups him with people who committed a spectrum of acts of varying levels of gravity. Some of them were not crimes. Some of these people didn't actually do anything to anyone. I think the right term for a person such as Epstein is "serial rapist."
Stallman called Epstein's sentencing extremely lenient to the point of being illegal, and that calling him a "sex offender" was too weak of a term and that he prefers to call him a "serial rapist".
He did not minimize Epstein's behavior. The original interpretation of his words in that way is not reasonable and may well have been an outright lie instead of an honest misinterpretation.
If there's one place in our society that should welcome discussion of ugly issues it should be our universities, particularly the few as storied as MIT.
His life's been ruined by a shrieking Twitter mob. Who's next? These sjws are complete parasites. They never fork. Just go after vulnerable people at the top and insinuate their way into established institutions.
Even if women who worked with him feel that way, you are highly unlikely to see such.
Women are generally more vulnerable than men. Other women will tear apart a "traitor" to the feminist cause. Defending someone who is the focus of a metaphorical lynch mob almost never helps them and frequently means you are next.
Because they are the people who have been made uncomfortable by his behavior. If it were men, or also men, I'm sure the parent post would have read "men or women". This is not an abstract case, so implying that somehow men are underrepresented when dealing with a person whose (alleged) behavior has been targeted at women sounds a little petty.
Imagine someone is accused of abusing children, and the local prosecutor says "if we find that any children have been harmed, we will press charges". Do you really think you need to correct them by saying "but what about adults?" It's unnecessary, and distracts from the actual case.
The post just asks a question. I'm sure plenty of men were also made uncomfortable by his behavior and stubborness with regards to free software. I'm just asking why exclude those?
I don't think doing uncomfortable things necessarily means harmful abuse, so your metaphor doesn't help me much.
I guess we've just reached the point as a society where we've decided that we enjoy the professional bloodlust of burning anyone at the stake that isn't a paradigm of behavior to leave any room for forgiveness. Welcome to the new Salem.
The thing that I find particularly obscene about these cyber lynchings is that the leaders are almost always the most privileged people in the entire world: youngish white college graduates who live in urban California and work for evil surveillance advertising companies or banks - in the 80's, they called them "yuppies."
I think it must be a way to deal with the guilt of getting paid gobs of cash while walking past dozens of homeless people every day - feel better (and more importantly, look better) by saving the hypothetically oppressed from the opinions of potential tyrants. I'm also assuming once Trump is out of office it'll all be back to business as usual.
Lynching is a pretty bad analogy. He did not die. He was not physically harmed. A guy around retirement age decided to resign from a couple of jobs.
Stallman got away with a lot for decades because he had much more privilege than the people he harmed. He might still be getting away with it had MIT not gotten caught making themselves absolutely eager to run with a serial predator. But just because somebody gets away with a lot doesn't mean he's entitled to do that forever. Nothing happened here but the consequences of his own actions finally catching up with him.
That's fair, I don't know of a less extreme word. I don't mean it in the way that it means in the southern US, but in the more broad sense of "trial-less mob justice action".
That didn't happen either. He made public comments and received public criticism. If MIT and the FSF board thought there wasn't a problem, they could have kept him on. He chose to resign.
If there's any lack of due process, it's at those institutions. But given how both organizations protected him for decades, it seems to me that the real lack of due process was in failing for many years to handle complaints about his behavior.
This type of Justice is always highly emotional, with little or zero due process, often as wrong as it gets it right, and doles out punishments well out of scope of the alleged crime.
Invoking "Trump" needlessly cheapened your comment, which was otherwise relevant (although I'd include "journalists" as the leaders). It's always "business as usual" - regardless of which skinjob has won the job of absorbing outrage.
I thought calling it an "obscene cyber lynching" committed by "young white college graduates who live in urban California and work for evil companies" cheapened it quite severely before even getting to the latter half of the comment.
That's really the main point, though. People complain about "punching down" in comedy, but that's all this ever looks like to me. It's always somebody who works at Google, or Facebook, or Salesforce, or blah blah blah, which is something that I consider to be far, far more egregious than telling off color jokes or defending the reputation of your deceased friend. If you spy on people or send spam to make money, you're a bad person and you've got no grounds at all to tell other people how to think. It smacks of the bourgeoisie telling the peasants to get in line. That's my opinion.
It's certainly not an endorsement, just an observation. I think a lot of people, myself included, feel like the world just kind of went _crazy_ in 2016, and it hasn't been the same since. Of course, it didn't really change all that much - there aren't secret nazis everywhere, antifa isn't an international communist conspiracy - it's just kooks - all your neighbors are the same people. Still, our social immune system is flaring up at record highs and the symptoms are showing. Things certainly can't continue as they are.
I think that Trump be ousted via impeachment or in the next election, and then there will be an international sigh of relief, and a lot of these outraged mobs will stop gnashing their teeth so much. Everybody will go back to enjoying the amenities provided by the decline of human civilization.
I can see specific outrage mobs slowing the gnashing of their teeth, but I don't see the trend stopping. The outrage feels like it's coming from the same place of powerlessness as during the Bush II years.
And sympathizing with the other tribe, the Obama years were only a reprieve due to perspective. And though we may judge their outrage as ridiculous ("Barry Soetoro"), that doesn't make it any less real. To me, Trump seems like a product of this craziness rather than a cause.
Perhaps this author is unaware of the number of statements Stallman has made regarding pedophilia on his website over the years [1]. If RMS has changed his point of view, he can go back to those parts of his blog and add an update.
Yeah. It's not clear to me whether or not RMS still believes these things. He may need time to collect himself. In the mean time, I don't understand blog posts like this one that completely gloss over his past statements which remain the same without further comment.
Are you referring to this brief statement [1]? That does not pass as sincere in my book. Good luck to him in the future, I hope he gets everything sorted.
> As an active feminist and one who has witnessed much bad behavior among tech CEOs over the past 30 years, I think that accusing Richard Stallman of not supporting women, gays, or any other minority group is false. Look at his real history — […] — but his record in helping to give everyone in the world access to free software.
What kind of bullshit is this? Stallman's advocacy for open source in no way whatsoever makes him a champion for women, gay people, or any other marginalized group, and does not even remotely excuse his behavior.
Sylvia, calling yourself a feminist doesn't actually make you one.
> Look at his real history — not the sign about welcoming “hot ladies” on his MIT Media lab office door, which someone else wrote as a joke and which he removed but not before someone took a photo of it — but his record in helping to give everyone in the world access to free software. He has truly made our world a better, more free place.
Just because someone did good things doesn't automatically make the bad things he said or did go away. This is a very dangerous position to hold.
Stallman has an established record going back more than ten years of saying despicable things about women and children and the only reason why this reckoning didn't happen to him until today is because people like the author of this article gave him a pass for philosophical reasons.
She is part of the problem and one of the reasons why women are having such a hard time in the industry today.
No, he has been widely reported for decades that he behaved unprofessionally, and harassed women who worked with him.
That it took him publicly taking the position that child sex work was acceptable is the problem - his long history should have got him fired decades ago.
If you assume he believes what he says, he is not qualified to teach kids. Sorry, I don't ascribe the qualities to him that the author accuses me of ascribing, but his views on child sex are deviant and unsafe.
Stallman resigned from MIT and the FSF. So why are we still talking about it? It's not going change any of this or exonerate his name. You only have one reputation and once it's damaged, it's very hard to recover. So all this talk is just arguments on the internet at this point. Time to move on.
Also, I realize this is an unpopular opinion here because of the lack of awareness that most outside this community don't even know who Stallman is nor care and can't accept they're wasting their time on this topic. The more he's talked about with regards to this controversy, the more he will be known for this issue and less about the things he fought over the decades for the free software movement. Good job everyone.
This article and thread further alienates those in this community who are affected by Stallman's comments and pushes them away. While providing no value other than creating a venue for others to talk past each other and upvoting/downvoting those who take their side. In other words, it's politics.
While he obviously has had a long relationship with Stallman, one of his key takeaways was:
"RMS’s loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because they are the right thing in the total situation."
Which I think is very well said. So while Paull's assessment that people's reaction to some email quotes is out-of-proportion, this is really just the proverbial straw on the back of the camel.
[0] https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...