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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I'm as much a RMS booster as you'll find, but he dug his own grave here. At a point in history when we're finally realizing that the kind of deeply sexist culture among our elites (i.e. one where male billionaire sex peddlers drive opinions among exclusively male elites by trading their harem of more-or-less-plausibly-consenting-maybe nubile girls) is toxic, Stallman walked right in with a "well, you know, this wasn't technically sexual assault".

I mean, he's not wrong. But he's missing the point, ethically. And given that his whole schtick is an ethical position... I dunno. It's time to step aside. Free Software can find better evangelists.

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You are missing the point here. It was a targeted attack on Stallman through mass media, social media.

It was targeted at the man who did and said a lot of bad things...

He's being "attacked" by FSF board members and employees, other free software foundations, and FLOSS advocates.

>He's being "attacked" by FSF board members and employees, other free software foundations, and FLOSS advocates.

Source on this? The only articles/blogs I've seen on this are from Vice, Selam G. (MIT alumni, unclear what her other affiliations are), and the Gnome foundation.

Former board member https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html & https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1172293871109320704

Founder of FSF's GPL Compliance Labs https://twitter.com/NovalisDMT/status/1172573166956437505

Former FSF staff https://twitter.com/georgialyle/status/1173788445732462593

FSF member since 2004 https://twitter.com/downey/status/1172328679889756162 Other members https://twitter.com/dustyweb/status/1173690170090168320 & https://twitter.com/j00bar/status/1172309099410669568

Free Software Conservancy https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/sep/16/rms-does-not-spea...

Senior staff technologist at EFF https://twitter.com/cooperq/status/1173789555993956352

Forbes writer and "FOSS advocate" https://twitter.com/killyourfm/status/1173014344973598722

Director of community for DIAL Community (part of the Open Source Center at the UN Foundation) https://twitter.com/cooperq/status/1173789555993956352

Tech author https://twitter.com/mwlauthor/status/1173690259277848576

[Not sure how to describe Sarah Jeong briefly] https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/561785170538553344

thanks.

If he lost their support he should step down anyway.

The fact that he thought it smart to step forward illustrates that he is not so smart when it comes to these types of social issues. Someone as high profile as him commenting on a friend's situation only brings more attention to his friend. It's likely that without the comments of RMS his friend would have received far less publicity.

Has his late friend actually received increased publicity from this? Most of the stories and social media commentary I've seen don't mention Minksy at all, instead claiming that Stallman defended Epstein.

His entire interjection was around trying to corral wild accusation inflation with regard to his late friend.

Here are the emails. Read em.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-091320191420...

His late friend being Minksy, not Epstein. Which makes the headlines about him defending Epstein... puzzling.

What is puzzling about the media lying to you, either directly or indirectly? Do you really think professional journalists and editors did not know those headlines would be confusing, they have intentionally conflated him speaking in support of a personal friend and defending the ring leader who he never met, that is intentional on the part of those publications, they know what they are doing. The implication of the headline being Stallman supports Minksy, Minsky was allegedly associated with Epstein so RMS defends Epstein, I'm not sure if that is considered a strawman or an abuse of modus ponens but I'm sure there is some term for that sort of misleading statement.

In truth, I am not as puzzled as I claimed. However I've found that on HN there is a pathological obsession with giving people and organizations the benefit of the doubt, even when they don't deserve it. Consequently I sometimes understatement matters dramatically instead of saying what I really think.

Eh. I don't think it's necessarily so much giving people the benefit of a doubt rather than being extremely sensitive to the niggling details, and being dead set in the route of "if you're going to ruin another person's life/reputation over it, it had better damn well be consistent in the face of even modest levels of scrutiny".

It's fine to haul injustice into the light of day to be dealt with. It isn't okay to maliciously interpret/misrepresent things because you think someone is weird, or they make you uncomfortable, or because you're getting carried away with the political cause of the week.

>GP: abuse of modus ponens Abuse of Transitivity would be closer to the mark I think.

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