> It's weird to me that being considered a "defender of X" could even be a bad thing. That's the process by which we collectively make decisions, it's the basis behind stuff like fair trials for example; the lawyer acting for a defendant is not a bad person.

Except that in fair trials we have the concept of stare decisis, that once something has been decided, it's been decided. We very intentionally do not have the courtroom try to reason something out from first principles every time. We do not defend each person who runs a red light by saying, is it actually bad to run a red light. The cases which do overturn existing legal or social precedent are rare, carefully picked by the lawyers to be as sympathetic as possible (cf. Rosa Parks), and carefully timed to line up with sufficient hope of social consensus having changed around the law.

While it is absolutely your right to say "What if this bad thing is not actually bad," to do so without presenting a novel argument about it, and especially to do so for the sake of being contrarian, is not how we make decisions. You should look at the strongest arguments on both sides. You should privately take the opposing side and then see if you can knock it down.

The arguments Stallman presented were hardly arguments and were not novel at all. They're arguments that have occurred to the people he's arguing against, already. If he wants to seek the truth and not just advocate a side, he could have and should have figured that out. I still believe in his right to free speech (in the sense that I would defend his freedom to speak without government coercion), but I don't think he made a contribution to the discourse that's worth defending at a social level.