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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I think I mostly agree with you, but what should happen to people with "inexcusable behavior?" should they be fired once? Should they be unemployable for all time? Is justice served after decades of living in a gutter? When we react with outrage mob justice we make people toxic to all future employers. It's extremely hard to ever rebuild your life, especially now where everything on the internet lives forever. I agree that we need to turn around acceptance of "brilliant jerks" but the Law of Unintended Consequence here in many cases seems way worse than the original problem we were trying to solve.

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RMS is not going to have a problem finding employment in six months or so. He's just going to have to spend some time demonstrating he's not a sexist liability before he can take leadership positions again.

That seems reasonable and fair.

> I agree that we need to turn around acceptance of "brilliant jerks" but the Law of Unintended Consequence here in many cases seems way worse than the original problem we were trying to solve.

Which is... what exactly? You're appealing to a slippery slope but from my perspective we climbed UP said slope to get to holding RMS to account for years of bad behavior, and even now reprehensible folks are using awful excuses like, "They're just on the spectrum" as ammo in the "Yes but he's a powerful man" argument they've been winning for a long time.

RMS is unemployable at this point. He is also 66, so he could just retire as an option.

Why is he unemployable?

He was in a leadership position for a long time while also having very poor soft skills. His value was primarily symbolic, and that symbolism has been pretty much destroyed at this point.

He could try to rebuild his career, but he is 66 so unlikely he will try.

RMS hasn’t had a paid job as a programmer for 40 years as far as I know. People say he was homeless and living in his office at MIT while working on GNU in the 80s.

Isn’t he basically a speaker and advocate nowadays? That career is unlikely to be very successful now that all major organizations dumped him and he has fake news headlines saying he defended Epstein following him everywhere (backed up by apparently two decades of known antisocial personal behavior).

He doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of person you’d hire to work as a normal developer nor would that comport with his strange ethics of refusing to use any non-Free software.

Judging from the balance in this thread I'd say he's still extremely employable.

Defending someone’s speech rights (no matter how horrible the speech is) is very different from wanting to work with someone.

There are no applicable speech rights in a legal sense within RMS's personal scope, so I'm skeptical of this intent.

There are speech rights that are not protected legally, rather based on culture, tradition, and so on. I don’t know what these are like at MIT, but they are fairly broad in a lot of western educational institutions.

Those aren't "rights", those are "norms." When you engage in exceptional behavior (like suggesting a child sex slave's docile appearance excuses Minksy'd responsibility to not rape kids) then your norms may find themselves superceded.

But ultimately RMS's positon was one of political, not technical, leadership. With no more supporters, the FSF rejected him. Without the FSF, what purpose could he serve at his job?

His expertise is software development and the open source world. he can make contributions as long as he is able to swing a patch against a git repository.

That doesn't imply any institution of higher learning or software advocacy organization needs to grant him their imprimatur to do it.

This is the sad truth of the times we live in. You garner an audience, and then you exhibit an opinion that is controversial then well, you shall be promptly destroyed. And these things need not happen now. You garner an audience at any point in the future and your online presence will be decompiled, diagnosed for bugs, and all errors will be promptly ostracized by the armchair armada of online experts. This is the age that the internet lurker is now the commentator, the internet commentator is now the journalist, and the journalist is now the lawyer. Your livelihood now at the mercy of any and all denizens, including bots, though they only give 3/5s the upvote.

What should happen is that he should either find an employer who will tolerate his inexcusable behavior, go into business for himself, or learn to shut the hell up at work.

We don’t need to worry about his entire life. That’s his job. We can say “this person clearly should not be leading an advocacy group” without figuring out a whole future career path for him.

Of course they should still be able to live a good life, but they should certainly not be able to hold a position of power over the people who their opinions are offensive towards and still be allowed to express those opinions.

> I think I mostly agree with you, but what should happen to people with "inexcusable behavior?"

They certainly _shouldn't_ be in a leadership position... (where that "inexcusable behavior" becomes a barrier to participation for various groups)

Let me guess, you and your friends alone get to decide what "inexcusable behavior", "barrier" and "various groups" means right?

I don't think it's terribly controversial to say that someone who has a history of making inappropriate comments about women would make it less likely that women would be interested in participating in an organization where that person is in leadership. Do you disagree?

Definitely RMS should be unemployable in any position which would involve public prominence, leadership, or significant influence. After a decent amount of time if he makes a believable atonement perhaps some return would be possible.

maybe people think you "should be unemployable in any position which would involve public prominence, leadership, or significant influence."

are you even thinking about what you're writing? it seems like you're just attacking for the sake of it.

you've spammed this conversation with your input... what, 20 different times?

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