Remove Richard Stallman: Appendix A
medium.com
medium.com
I don't like the outrage culture and twitter witchuhnts either but this seems to be more than digging up a bad joke someone said 10 years ago.
> Alumni from as far back as the 1980’s reached out to me and told horrifying stories, such as:
1) An emacs joke.
2) RMS had a mattress and grody friends in his office.
3) RMS is awful at asking women out.
That's beyond awful at asking women out, especially given that the woman in question was an undergrad at the time.
People on the spectrum tend not to speak emotions and empathy as a native language. But they’re often good learners if properly taught. Never setting boundaries for RMS for decades may have contributed to him never been properly housebroken and ultimately didn’t do him any favors.
I don't disagree.
Picture yourself as a freshman in a university where the vast majority of senior academics are gay and keep asking you out on dates. You can always say no, but don’t you think you would perceive this as a rather hostile environment?
What RMS did in that instance was certainly gross and awkward but in no way hostile. People lack perspective.
No, I'd see it as pathetic and desperate. Which is exactly how I felt about the men and women that worked for the university I attended and were known to date students or had hit on me.
Now if we wanted to talk "hostile environment" the uncomfortable situation my gay highschool principal put me in always drops jaws when I tell the story, but I just think it's funny. I shrugged it off in about 30 seconds and doesn't even rate on the list of things I didn't like about highschool.
Have you actually read it?
Further do court documents and other testimony related to the Epstein investigation not agree with RMS's comments on Mr. Minsky? There is a statement that Minsky refused relations with the girl, perhaps due to realizing what was going on.
People are giving Mr. Minsky flak for not refusing the donation, but refusing before the wide publicity of the Epstein scandal probably would have landed him in hot water for some variation of "why did you not take the free money?" or "why are you accusing this upstanding donor of human trafficking and statutory rape?"
But to paint him as a pedophile and a molester - that's really crossing a line. I disagree with RMS on many topics, but the mass hysteria going on right now is mind boggling.
> A Dutch study published in 1987 found that a sample of boys in paedophilic relationships felt positively about them. And a major if still controversial 1998-2000 meta-study suggests – as J Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, Chicago, says – that such relationships, entered into voluntarily, are "nearly uncorrelated with undesirable outcomes".
> Most people find that idea impossible. But writing last year in the peer-reviewed Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Bailey said that while he also found the notion "disturbing", he was forced to recognise that "persuasive evidence for the harmfulness of paedophilic relationships does not yet exist".
I find even thinking about these things disgusting, but if we want to be fair, he just repeated what the article says. If the SWJs feel outraged (why now? his page has been public for decades), they should attack the scientists who presented the findings of these studies.
so if it had not affected women this author wouldn't have given a shit? typical. Everything in this article is just a hatred for not only a great software protagonist but probably a hatred for men everywhere that voice their views out loud.
"In this section, I acknowledge that I do not have as many photos, emails, or written records as evidence. I do, however, have witnesses."
Then the author proceeds to spew out so-called quotes with nobody being held responsible for any of the quotes. And a further bit down, she quotes someones "female" opinion about sexism (with obviously no male voice in it).
"3. Going Forward, be proactive instead of reactive.", seems she didn't think of any of this until she wrote the sexist hate-filled article about Richard Stallman.
referencing the pound-me-too movement shows just how anti-male this woman is. god help whatever man she gets into her trap of faux love.
or perhaps she just hates how "white" Stallman is?
The author does not seem to make this assertion, and what you have quoted definitely does not support your claim.
> Then the author proceeds to spew out so-called quotes with nobody being held responsible for any of the quotes.
It's understandable why those people may want to remain anonymous. Are you trying to imply the quotes are faked?
> referencing the pound-me-too movement shows just how anti-male this woman is.
How does it show that?
> or perhaps she just hates how "white" Stallman is?
This is quite a reach.
* "This attack on Richard Stallman feels much like a witch hunt to me."
The "attack" in question is an appendix to a blog post. The original one said, in substance, "I do not know much about the accused, and he certainly didn't say what many press accounts accuse him of, but his recent words deserve punishment." The appendix blog post says, in brief, "oh my, this is all goes way back."
Does that sound like The Crucible or "she turned me into a newt?" Although the rest of the HN comment is more honest, calling what RMS said "questioning the status quo [about the victim status of, well, child rape victims.]"
* "These activists are just power hungry evil people."
Reacting to a blog post written by a person who is (weakly) hiding her full identity, who works in a tech/robotics company rather than in an activist organization, who recently deactivated her WordPress website, and who is not pointing to any means of activism. All very consistent steps to ambitious activism, certainly.
* "These stories are so opposite of horrifying"
Sentence followed by a complete rewrite of the said stories, using deliberately misleading edulcoration (Stories 1 and 2), or showing the same kind of argumentation as in "oh because autism," which is well argued against in the main thread [1], instead of realizing that being that being "awful at asking women out" involves clumsiness rather than suicide blackmail (Story 3).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20993532
(Add.) I find it hard to read threads such as this one and not feel that tropes about computer people hold some truth, despite myself feeling close to that group for various reasons.
At the wrong end of the tunnel of light
Practitioners of paramount scorn
And those who'd rig moral compass rather than bridges”
Ever since I read these lyrics they’ve summed up precisely how I feel the world is recently.
What does "mixed" mean in the author's bio? Is that relating to techinical accumen, race, or something else?