In Defense of Richard Stallman
geoff.greer.fm
geoff.greer.fm
Inclusiveness -- but let's ostracize the non-conforming aspie...
Fairness -- but let's fire people or make them resign from unrelated positions for their personal opinions, because obviously all of a person's life should serve as a big PR, and god forbid they don't play the role 24/7. Someone might call them for it on Twitter, and what could their employee/organization do other than fire them? (in the "Land of the free" nonetheless)
Not to mention the blatant conformity and blandness -- punishing experimentation, personality, eccentricity, being the devil's advocate, controversiality, and, worse of all, being 'unprofessional' (as if the FSF is something akin to 1970s IBM)...
First they came for Patch Adams...
The current environment rewards the worst kind of scum: holier-than-thou hypocritical tell-tales and people who enjoy yielding power over others by drawing lynch-mobs.
I have wrote against Epstein here in several threads, but I could have lunch with a person who has controversial opinions on the matter like Stallman. People like those who finger-pointed and cheered on the personal consequences on Stallman, I'd prefer to live in another universe from.
Are you happy now? Justice for Epstein's victims served? (on someone who never even met Epstein)
Speak up now, or don't bother to cry crocodile tears and set up the "black ribbon" when we eventually lose Stallman, and tell stories of how he inspired you, etc...
You have just outlined the double-speak of the SV technocracy, which have imposed these hidden codes on those that they disagree with. Mind you that the media has now amplified this and have used all of this to create a new enemy called Richard Stallman. As long as this appalling cancel-culture behaviour stops, he certainly won't be the last one to fall victim to these purity tests.
Absolutely hypocritical indeed.
what really happened was that he went from holding leadership positions in three prominent institutions to just one. it's easy to have strong feelings about these issues, but let's try to keep things in perspective.
and according to stallman's personal site, he's found interim housing (https://stallman.org/).
Accommodations underneath bridges and even worse places for our homeless are unfortunately a widespread issue in the US.
He’s had to move, he’s lost all his potions, etc.
There was very little discourse and punishment was swift. That’s not really the way justice should be served. This man (RMS), essentially spent his life fighting for others. He was thrown to the wolves without discussion.
We don’t know if it’s true but:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103133
In either case, to your comment, he was stripped of his life. To say otherwise is disingenuous.
It’d be like saying: I took your house and job, but left you the car.
That’d still be striping you of land and title (to your comment)
> I continue to be the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project. I do not intend to stop any time soon.
apparently the site was previously defaced by an FSF employee.
You are right. Let's try to keep things in perspective.
It's not just them, this seems to be a far leftist direction in general.
It's actually not a modern day thing, it's more like classic propaganda. Someone motivates someone to lie about something, then tells specific people in the press who are willing to write about it, often for some monetary gain. This has been done for as long as "free" press existed.
I haven't even found anything concrete about this whole debacle, and HN usually has the cold hard facts tldr laid bare in the top comment. Not this time. It's a mult level wtf.
BTW: I have also suffered the tough, complicated, unstable and rare personality of Stallman. Not for that I want to see him dead but like everyone else, when he has been unrespectful with me, I let him know. Everyone who knows Stallman knows he's a complicated and tough guy with very radical opinions and position. I was at a conference where he was cleaning the dirt from his toes while explaining everything, imagine the scene…
Edit: The downvotes are interesting given that this is how Stallman himself characterized those posts:
"Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it."
“There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.“
https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
I'll also add some more context: These current thoughts on pedophilia were posted two days after the "Remove Richard Stallman" Medium post went up.
This was over a decade ago (first link), and appear to be musings on the issue. It doesn’t necessarily say (as you claim) - “I support this”
Can you quote/link those instances since the two statements that you quoted don't say that at all.
He's rejecting the arguments that pedophilia causes harm to children, because sometimes it's voluntary and therefore isn't harmful.
Do I really need to explain how "Pedophilia is sometimes not harmful to children" can be summarized as "Sometimes sex with children is fine"?
No, he is not saying that. In that quote that you used he isn't even saying that pedophilia isn't harmful when it is consensual. I'm really interested how you reached that conclusion while reading the same text I'm reading.
> Pedophilia is sometimes not harmful to children
As far as I can see those are your words and not his. Where does he say that? Besides, not harmful and fine are to completely different things.
> Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
In those words he was saying that in some cases there is nothing wrong with an adult having sex with a child. So I guess what's left is whether "fine" and "nothing wrong with" are equivalent.
That is not making it clearer. First, I was interested in how you interpreted the quote you used as you did. This doesn't make it clearer. Secondly, I don't know if the quote you are using now is referencing the firs quote or something else. I suspect that you do not either.
Also it seems that you have some axe to grind against the man. Here is the full quote:
>> Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
>> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
> In those words he was saying that in some cases there is nothing wrong with an adult having sex with a child.
We are not talking about those words, are we?
Here's where it all started:
> Me: "No, but he did say that having sex with children is sometimes fine"
> You: "Can you quote/link those instances since the two statements that you quoted don't say that at all."
Here is a statement from Stallman himself summarizing his own words: "Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it."
So he said himself that what he was saying back then was that in some instances there is nothing wrong with sex between an adult and a child.
This is my answer to your original question. He explained it himself.
Just to be clear, I agree with everything that's being said in this article. I can't understand how some people read Stallman's words and understand the exact opposite of what he is saying. But I find equally incomprehensible how can you read that quote and still need an explanation on how one thing implies the other.
I find it bad myself (I'd say: have sex after 16 and generally with people closer to their age progressively -- e.g. a 16 yo should be able to sleep with a 18 year old, but not sure with a 25 or 40 year old, it would be more manipulative. After adult age, at 18 of course, anything should go), but from what I read:
"As of May 2019, in all but two states, a minor can marry with parental consent or with judicial authorisation, with the minimum marriage age, when all exemptions are taken into account, being as low as 14, and potentially lower."
So, if judges are OK with this, how can Stallman lose their job, not because he did it, but because he merely theorized about people doing it?
I mean, when I was 10-12, I engaged in private circle jerks with other boys. And we "played Doctor" with girls. No sex, but feeling and "examinations". And spin the bottle games, for taking off clothes and kissing. And holding our brearh, and squeezing each others chests to pass out.
As a child, I might well have argued that.
But now, I appreciate that children are easily manipulated. So while it's possible that some particular child might have freely chosen to have sex with some particular adult, there's no way to determine that. And so the rule must be that children can't reliably consent.
Still, people have the right to say whatever they like. And people also have the right to vilify them for it. And so, recursively, ad infinitum.
What's more interesting is the reason that Guardian article exists. It's basically an attempt to justify why Liberty (then the National Council for Civil Liberties), a respectable British political pressure group with close ties to our Labour party, was lobbying the government to legalise sex between adults and children a few decades ago. (They were also affiliated with the Paedophile Information Exchange, which was exactly what the title suggests.)
Why does something that happened a few decades ago matter now? Obviously it was relevant to the whole scandal over historic allegations of childhood sexual abuse, especially since PIE was run by pedophiles in important political positions. On top of that, one of the most important current-day Labour politicians Harriet Harman bootstrapped her political career using the important roles her and her husband played in the National Council for Civil Liberties during the exact time period where they had those ties to PIE and were doing that lobbying. She's still relevant today; various journalists and politicians are trying to wrangle her a position as Speaker or maybe even Prime Minister.
We could well end up with someone building a path to one of the most important positions in UK government on her role in an organisation lobbying in support of pedophilia a few decades ago whilst Stallman is made homeless based, in part, on his summary of the apologia for that lobbying printed in the mainstream press.
(Stallman completely missed this subtext, but that's not surprising; I don't think the full details became public knowledge until some time later.)
Except he has (https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html):
> 14 September 2019 (Sex between an adult and a child is wrong) Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it. Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
However since we're in the era of unerasable past, its kind of expected for people to do dig up the past. I do wonder if "society" will start applying a consistency stick to what people say. I.e. if they have had a consistent view on say pedophilia in this instance.
On that note was Stallman consistent over time to this day?
I believe the girl was 17 and probably gave the impression (when put in a group with other girls) to be older.
And 17 is not illegal in most countries, so morally that age by itself is and should not be a major issue.
“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.“
Just not to be skeptical and keep his job...
Oh, the hypocrisy...
> If there's no bullying, no coercion, no abuse of power, if the child enters into the relationship voluntarily … the evidence shows there need be no harm.
> 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".
So why nobody attacks The Guardian for publishing such statements? Yes, these things are against common sense, against natural feelings, and I refuse to believe them. But Stallman was just repeating what someone else researched.
Was he repeating anyone here? Could you take the posts as a whole and resist the urge to cherry pick?
i.e. people shouldn't just protest it for people they like, but people they hate or vehemently disagree with as well.
https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendi...
Someone else downthread also linked about how a woman he worked with on a Linux project had to be warned of his arrival ahead of time so she could leave because of his aggressive advances toward her.
> Someone else downthread also linked about how a woman he worked with on a Linux project had to be warned of his arrival ahead of time so she could leave because of his aggressive advances toward her.
Just an FYI the person who said that already had beef with RMS. I’d recommend reading fully into the situation - perhaps you still believe it, but at least you’ll know.
> I recall being told early in my freshman year “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.”
That sounds like a joke. I mean, it is a joke. That isn't a serious comment/strategy on harassment. No creep has ever been forestalled by someone claiming to be a vi user.
1 stupid opinion and 3 negative comments, one of which looks like a joke, from 1980 to 2019 isn't evidence of a problem with Stallman.
"He's a pretty eccentric bloke" is not enough to justify using something that looks like a joke as evidence of problems stretching back to 1980. That quote is 33% of the shocking evidence mentioned in this link section 2.
The vi vs emacs 'holy war' is also a long running joke that Stallman gets involved in sometimes. He doesn't actually object to vi.
How is a host meant to figure any of the details in that rider out ahead of a Stallman visit without him telling them? It could easily be a log of all the things that have gone wrong for him in the past.
People like to go to the parrot quote. It wouldn't at all surprise me if a Stallman fan who was putting him up the the night tried to buy a parrot if they thought it would make him happy. The man's selfless dedication to the public good has earned him a couple of true believers over the years.
It is also comprehensive and doesn't mention anything about Vi.
Or perhaps a counter-balance to the "Stallman run amok/let's crucify him" variety? How about that?
Is the "tip of the iceberg" meant to be sarcastic? One of the headings is even "1. Richard Stallman has problematic opinions". Opinions are enough to have someone persecuted? What happened to free discourse then?
Are only "non problematic" opinions allowed? And who would be the arbiter of this? At some point a gay man being married was also a "problematic opinion". Or a mixed race couple. And not in Nazi Germany, in e.g. 70s USA. Let that sink in, before condemning "problematic" opinions.
"MIT, by endorsing Stallman, also gives legitimacy to these ideas."
MIT endorses Stallman as an academic or whatever he employs him for. Not as a wholesale controller and endorser of Stallman's ideas and personality.
"I recall being told early in my freshman year “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.”"
That's a horrifying story? At best it's a joke about someone who hits on freshman students frequently.
"He literally used to have a mattress on the floor of his office. He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it."
Oh, the humanity.
"the mattress was also known to have shirtless people lounging on it…"
Spoken like a person who has never experienced the 60s and 70s campuses...
"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."
OK, that's creepy. Could also be a desperate attempt at connection by a depressive. It was also a conversation between two adults, and one could tell him to fuck (which from what I gather, is what happened, if more eloquently, and without further issue).
"But MIT is a privileged place. We have the right to choose who we admit, hire, or endorse."
I thought the whole idea these days was against privilege.
And where were all these good souls when their privileged MIT helped threaten Aaron Swartz with jail, and helped led him to commit suicide?
Until this debacle I didn't realize so many people in our industry can voluntarily refrain from most basic reading comprehension. There's no discussion with people who simply refuse to read and comprehend a plain English sentence. There were moments I felt this was approaching Varelse level of Foreignness[0] - a mind so alien that it's hard to communicate, a mind that looks at a written sentence and understands the exact opposite of what it was communicating.
--
[0] - https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Hierarchy_of_Foreignness
This is a tried and true tactic and it works. Issue certainly is not "reading comprehension".
How many fingers?
I can't remember exactly when "Flame Warriors" came out ( https://www.politicsforum.org/flame-warriors/ ) - possibly back in 1999 ... but it was clear trouble was ahead...
Most of the people around the campus probably don't think of him as "RMS, open source evangelist," they think of him as "RMS, that creepy guy who keeps hitting on people even after they ask him to stop." In that context, this letter can be read in a much worse light.
Citation needed for everything after the "apparently"; but in particular - even the gossip I've read suggests he took No as an answer just fine.
The stories on HN over the last week have generally been him asking women out in a bizarre way and then accepting a quite predictable "no". And even then most of the stories are poorly sourced.
However, you _feeling_ uncomfortable is not enough. If you feel uncomfortable with people eating meat around you, that's your problem and not harassment, because eating meat is reasonable in our society.
I had friends meet Stallman in some conference, and they told me he could make everybody (not just women) "feel uncomfortable around him" in some ways (but nothing an adult shouldn't be able to handle).
Now, if this is about attacking women (physically, or sexually, etc) that would be something else, and would need to be addressed on its own, not using his Epstein comments, and distorting them at that.
Even so, "Not taking "no" for an answer" seems to imply something close to rape or sexual assault -- wheres "making uncomfortable" seems to imply some inconvenience at most.
If he took his willy out, or touched some woman's privates, it shouldn't be called merely "making uncomfortable".
"Making Uncomfortable", at least to my understanding, falls more on the "whistles the Popeye theme incessantly", "smells", "shouts Eureka when he has an idea", "swears a lot", "is totally blunt about weight gains", "looks you dead in the eyes for minutes" etc, realm -- not fire-able offenses outside of a customer facing / corporate environment.
>"RMS, that creepy guy who keeps hitting on people even after they ask him to stop."
Like, asking some person out or something? There's a line there in how we went about it. Many a relationships and happy marriages have started from a person who insisted (even if they were told to stop or "it will never happen between us") - and that's for both men hitting on women, women hitting on men, gays hitting on gays, and lesbians hitting on lesbians. Humans are complicated that way. Some cases persisted for months of years, but eventually the other side agreed and they lived happily ever after (I know several cases).
Of course if he was a jerk about it that's different. There's a line between "asked me out several times even though I said no every time", and "he raised his voice/threatened/followed me out/etc".
(Note that myself can't help (mild aspie) but overanalyze the situation logically, YMMV. Probably you could already tell from the balanced parentheses in prose).
I'm not completely sure about the answer, but that description sits well on a spectrum of anti-social and is the only lens through which all this makes sense to me.
I had a colleague tell he won't invite X (a local celebrity with a lot of similarity in character with RMS) to our team because he "always feels like a fool when X is around".
> “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 suspect that he was kidding, but who knows?
0) https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendi...
Most people on campus think of RMS as a socially awkward crusader for free software. He has a reputation for pushing himself into positions where he's not wanted (e.g. handing out protest fliers at industry talks where MIT wants to maintain good relations, or responding to otherwise unrelated email threads where someone mentions proprietary software).
He had awkward posters on his door, but I've never heard of RMS hitting on people after they've asked him to stop. There's a big gap between "feel uncomfortable" and what you describe.
> Diversity -- but no diversity of opinion...
Is there any sort of evidence of action? Him having had sex with children?
If anything, it's you who left out the part where Stallman already said, before this incindent, that he was wrong. I.e. he said it because he actually changed his mind and believes he was wrong, not in order to "save face" or clear his image or avoid scandal or whatnot.
> If anything, it's you who left out the part where Stallman already said, before this incindent, that he was wrong. I.e. he said it because he actually changed his mind and believes he was wrong, not in order to "save face" or clear his image or avoid scandal or whatnot.
He posted that after the storm had started, three days before his resignation. A few days after the "Remove Richard Stallman" Medium post was written.
Do you think that's a complete coincidence? Has nothing to do with saving face and only his desire to explain that he had changed his mind?
From what I can tell from the snippets posted here, he isn't saying it's fine, he's saying he's seen insufficient evidence to form an opinion - and in such a state, he resists those who would force one on him with faulty reasoning. Or, to put it another way, he views morality with three responses [yes, no, I don't know], which causes friction with people who view it with two:
"Is involuntary pedophilia bad?" [yes] "Is all pedophilia bad?" [idk - insufficient evidence on voluntary or its inherent lack of existence] "Do you think that all pedophilia is bad?" [no - position held is idk, not yes] "Therefore, you think all pedophilia is good." [no - position held is idk, not yes]
A similar comparison might be being asked if you enjoyed an unreleased book, then using "no[, I haven't read it and formed an opinion]" to justify "you think the book is bad."
ETA: also, if he hasn't said more on the subject in recent years, it's silly to assume that he necessarily still hold these views or lack thereof.
You are right - I was under the impression that was posted earlier, but he posted that immediately after the email thread was "leaked" to Vice. It's no coincidence; I still think that, given his previous as well as ulterior behavior, as well as the timing, that it's a clarification he felt he needed to make (given the public accusations that started pouring). I.e. it still doesn't look to me like a dishonest attempt to save face by hiding his controversial opinions... he reacted too quick with that, while ignoring everything else.
“There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.“
I can give you the links but it's quite easy to Google.
Edit since I dug them up for another comment:
https://stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%20...
https://stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_January_2...
https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
Are people allowed to change their mind after having conversations that convince them that their position is wrong?
Especially if that recanting happens to take place right as the shitstorm about his writings and behavior has started.
I pretty much fully agree with this. I don't think he's evil or anything. The consequences of his statements just finally caught up with him, and in a big way since he seems to have had a strong "It's just how RMS is, he's such a great leader, just ignore him or steer clear of him or whatever" shield around him for all those years.
He was merely voicing the opinion "if all is consensual what's the problem"... An opinion he changed from later.
Can people still have controversial opinions without getting their lives destroyed?
Not without losing his job, apparently.
If people need to be concerned about having their lives ruined over what they write in an email, or an online forum, can’t you see what kind of chilling effect this has?
Or an employee that regularly talks publicly about how horrible your company is and that no one should work there. Can't discourage any expression of opinion, so what can you do?
Because what you said is such a broad generalization, that it feels "obviously true". But if you object to a person not being hired because she's black (although that's personally reasonable in some very limited circumstances) - then maybe you should object too for a person being dismissed on words completely unrelated to the work he was supposed to perform.
Or an employee who regularly publishes manifestos on why people of certain skin colors should be murdered and exterminated?
These are extreme examples of course, but you are saying that ideally no one should experience any consequences for expressing any opinion outside of work.
It's not that they should face no consequences - they should face consequences in the circles in which they express those views, ideally in the form of people disagreeing with them, but possibly also wanting to dissociate with them. If they try to keep those views out of the classroom, I don't have a problem with it.
In the classroom, you are the instrument of a consensus view. You must do your job. If you do it well, that's great. Your views outside the classroom should be irrelevant, and I can't help but notice that a lot of the time when people get in trouble for their views outside of work, it's because someone de-anonymised them.
We cannot have a world where people's actual opinions are forced to be equal to those their employers would be comfortable with. Your extreme examples are extreme indeed, but there are many examples, particularly in authoritarian regimes, where the extreme view is the correct one. So extreme-ness is not a good metric for whether views should be allowed or not.
I think the solution for everyone is to stay silent, and to discuss their views anonymously online. Their views will still have force at the ballot box - as they did at the last election (as much as I did not like the outcome, it was evidence that social shaming has limited power at changing how people vote). We should be suspicious of attempts to de-anonymise the internet.
Basically, dissent is important. So important that it is worth tolerating bad views to ensure dissent is not suppressed when it is needed.
Everyone who pictures the cancel-culture norms resulting in some sort of paradise where everyone believes nice things are delusional, they are simply ceding power to those who will use it for personal gain, and giving the currently powerful the tools to to cement that power.
In this extreme example of mine, would you be happy as a parent to have your children in this teacher's classroom? Would you be taking part in a free speech suppressing pitchfork mob if you were to call the school and express your opinion that you don't want your child to be taught by a pedophile?
"What he should have done was in my opinion deliver one policy speech. 'This is where we stand on antisemitism. This is where we stand on the mechanisms for dealing with antisemitism in our party. Case closed.' The other major mistake he made was .. a complete abandonment of the principle of free speech. People have a right to say and think whatever they want. 'I'm a member of the Labour Party. OK. I subscribe to Labour Party's political platform. That's what makes me a member.' But that doesn't mean you have the right to troll my Facebook postings, you have the right to vet everything I say or post on Instagram. I mean that's Romania under Ceausescu, that's North Korea under Kim Il Sung. That's now going to be the mandate of the Labour Party? To be trolling in your thoughts and ideas? To see whether you are an antisemite? Everybody, including you, including your camera people harbors some antisemitic stereotypes... OK. Who cares? I mean It's very hard to extirpate, ... because it's rooted in thousands of years. I mean it's everywhere. It's part of the atmosphere, it's part of the environment, it's part of the history. Do I not harbor any anti-black stereotypes any racist stereotypes? Do I harbor no sexist stereotypes? No! And now we are going to have a Labour Party, which is going to [?] the depths of your conscience, ... looking for some evidence of antisemitism, ...? It's complete lunacy and it's a complete repudiation, abandonment of the most fundamental principles of what's called the Enlightenment beginning with as the Germans put it in that nice German folk song Die Gedanken sind Frei (Thoughts are free). People have the right to think what they believe, and since thought is inseparable from speech, you have the right to think and speak as you please. And if you don't like what a person is saying then you have the right either not to listen or try to persuade the person ... but what you don't have the right to do is penalize people, punish people, expel people for their thoughts... It's a complete political disaster because all it does is it forces people to repress what they're thinking until a demagogue comes along and starts saying what you're thinking, what you were forced to repress. And instead of your erroneous thoughts having been answered, the fact that you were forced to repress them, it validates it for you. ... And then the demagogue comes along and starts to exploit all of those repressed thoughts. So morally it's unacceptable to try to police people's thoughts and politically it's a complete disaster." https://youtu.be/OPYfLY2cAi4?t=616
Update: There is also that famous video where Finkelstein talks about the "crocodile tears" of a German student taking about the son of Holocaust survivors being ... offensive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O5zgXeCynQ&t=209s
That said the language of diversity, fairness, inclusivity, tolerance, etc. isn’t meant to be taken literally (though it is by the intended audience, expectedly), or alternatively it’s applied at the discretion of those in power at the time. In the USSR and China (and other places) terms got used and abused to defeat previous in-groups (factions who held the same beliefs, mind you) who were taking too much power or were threatening those in power (even though all these people were in the same group or party).
All these terms are tools. They kind of mean them but they are double edged swords which will be used at discretion and will be interpreted at discretion as well.
They pulled the same crap in China, with excitable young minds as useful idiots serving the hidden political agendas of actors behind the scene.
It is informative to seriously review the Cultural Revolution, and the ensuing damage to the Chinese nation.
It reminds me also of a funny and universal thing I have noticed for example on Reddit. Moderators of subreddits, many of them dedicated to noble causes and ideas and supposedly anti system tend to be extremely autocratic and arbitrary in their decisions, even the worst judge in America would be more level headed.
I just hope that we applied the same rationale in an even-keeled and level-headed manner in other cases where similar concerns are raised.
I hope we don't make exceptions for our favorite pet causes no matter how close to the heart and rule against those who were found to have either voiced opinions or acted in an antagonistic manner to such causes, even when those decisions are thorny and sentimental.[1][2][3]
[1] Mozilla CEO resigns, opposition to gay marriage drew fire
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mozilla-ceo-resignation/m...
[2] Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich resigns in wake of backlash to Prop 8
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/03/mozilla-c...
[3] Did Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich Deserve To Be Removed From His Position?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...
edit: typo
Diversity: It's not about opinion, but about an authority figure doing things that harm his colleagues. I could have the opinion that you're an idiot and a liar, but if we were working together and I would constantly say that in the workplace where everyone hears, I would probably get fired.
Inclusiveness: It's not about ostracising, either, certainly not because of some mental disability. If someone harms his coworkers and won't stop, they cannot continue working.
Fairness: Again, the problem is not opinions but harmful actions. It certainly isn't about conformity. Harming the people you work with is not some sign of genius conducive to creativity.
I think that too many people are expressing strong opinions on the matter of sexual harassment and sexual assault without having studied the subject at all. Those are opinions based on deep ignorance of the matter.
> Diversity: It's not about opinion, but about an authority figure doing things that harm his colleagues. I could have the opinion that you're an idiot and a liar, but if we were working together and I would constantly say that in the workplace where everyone hears, I would probably get fired.
> Inclusiveness: It's not about ostracising, either, certainly not because of some mental disability. If someone harms his coworkers and won't stop, they cannot continue working.
> Fairness: Again, the problem is not opinions but harmful actions. It certainly isn't about conformity. Harming the people you work with is not some sign of genius conducive to creativity.
> I think that too many people are expressing strong opinions on the matter of sexual harassment and sexual assault without having studied the subject at all. Those are opinions based on deep ignorance of the matter.
I don't understand how any of this applies to Stallman. As far as I've gathered, most of the outrage against him are due to a few different posts over the last couple decades. Regardless of how morally reprehensible you think his views are, he's not saying them "constantly" and his actions certainly don't fit "harm his coworkers and won't stop".
Also you say it's about "harmful actions", but what harmful actions has he done? I ask this honestly and would like to know.
edit: Cleaned up the formatting of quotes.
Well unless you cite the research, the only option you've given us is to take your word.
So the answer is that a respected person may not ever have any opinion that can be construed as offensive ever in their entire life? I mean in this case Stallman didn't even go to any effort to spread these ideas around. The fact that they are even known is due to the articles written about a few posts spread over the last couple decades.
Also I'm a little unclear about your references to female students and LGBT members...weren't the posts that people took offense to mostly regarding pedophelia? Did I miss his other writings?
They might have been in the 70s and 80s. In 2019, if a LGBT member makes some threats, the institution will usually cave. In the old times people could lose their job if they were found out to be LGBT. Today people lose their jobs if they are accused from an LGBT perspective.
Pretending the power dynamics are the same as in decades past is hypocritical. Parents, relatives, and rural societies can still be (and are) cruel against LBGT people. Major companies, institutions, the law, modern media, etc? Not so much.
Too many people champion LGBT rights, feminism, etc today only because it's the default in "polite society" and the circles of power. If it was 1970 they would have followed the then mainstream treatment of women/LGBT, either like sheep or to their advantage -- as in fact, the majority (their parents) then did. Doesn't matter if they're different people than their parents -- the hypocrisy and the mechanism is the same is the same.
Only few courageous people have written/spoke out for decades about such matters, and now people come and use them to pursue careers, or gain followers -- and even more so, many use those causes to be cruel to people and gain power and social capital, the same way they would use their privilege against women/LGBT back in the day...
It's like Kurt Cobain seeing all the BS jocks that put him down sing "Smells like teen spirit"...
As for the "lots of research", in social studies it takes time to catch up with society (and it follows what brings in grants). There was lots of research back in the day too...
Start with what exactly? What is this in response to?
According to those actually familiar with the case, certain recent actions by Stallman drew attention to his problematic decades-long behavior, which finally resulted, after decades of ignored complaints, in his dismissal.
There's no denying the well-established fact that the vast majority of cases of inappropriate behavior goes unpunished; in a few cases, some media attention can lead to action. The percentage of bad actors (and according to those closest to him, Stallman is a bad actor) that are finally disciplined remains, sadly, very low, but it's a start.
There are always hysterics who cry about a PC mob or witch hunts, but those who are interested in the facts, take the time to Google for relevant studies, consider the numbers, and as those shrill claims just don't square with the facts, so are best ignored.
> If there are a large number of people in the United States who think that child pornography and sexual intercourse with minors should be legalized, this is the first I’m hearing of it
He never even said that!
This is just another SJW warrior pissed off about the fact that the reality differs from the fiction she has created for herself. People disagree, people are rude, and you WILL be offended sometimes, in the real world. And learning to deal with it is part of being an adult.
What do you think he really meant when he stated this?
A similar argument is already in practice in many places where illegal drugs possession is not punished (up to certain limits) but drug production is. Or when offering prostitution is not punished but requesting it is. Mind I am not saying they are exactly the same, I only showing that legal distinction is arbitrary and people should be free to comment on it.
I think this is the crux of the difference here. I don't think that expressing opinions should never have any consequences whatsoever. That's an absurd proposition to me. Maybe that's why I seem to be talking past people about this.
Which is irrelevant, as the parent didn't say that "expressing opinions should never have any consequences whatsoever".
He just said that having that particular opinion should not have any consequences.
That said,
>That's an absurd proposition to me.
What exactly is absurd about free speech and no consequences for expressing whatever opinion (even "Hitler's ideas were good") -- except when opinion becomes action?
Obviously nobody includes "people shouldn't dislike you for your opinions", or "your readership should not change for your opinions" when they say about no consequences.
They mean: not getting thrown to jail, not loosing your job, especially if it's totally unrelated with your opinions, not being ex-communicated, etc...
And if friends and family could also get sticks out of their asses, and e.g. be OK with you having a different opinion (e.g. being atheist or a Democrat or a Republican or whatever), and just judge you on what you actually do, that would be great too...
(of course you shouldn't write a post about how "X company is crap" if you work for X and not expect to get fired")
I'll use this as my example for why I think it's absurd. Why do you think you shouldn't write that post? It's just an opinion, right?
If I understand you correctly then you're saying that there are some opinions that you could expect to be fired for expressing, even if they are completely legal to express. I agree with that.
Our definitions of what you can expect to have consequences however seems very different. And that's fine.
Au contraire, I think you should write that post if you're of that opinion. And I think it would be beneficial to society to write it too.
What I wrote is that you shouldn't write it "and not expect to get fired" -- because that's what will probably happen. If it was to me, that shouldn't happen either. But a company is a private business, and the law allows them to fire people at will (I'd change that too, like we have it in Europe).
I stated though that you should not "lose your job [for your opinions], especially if it's totally unrelated with your opinions" (the job being unrelated to what you spoke, that is).
Extreme example: An employee at your company keeps a blog about how having sex with children is perfectly fine, how black people are all stupid and how jews should be exterminated because Hitler had the right idea. Also that almost all accusations of rape are false because all women are lying bitches. All perfectly legal opinions that don't relate directly to his work.
Is it your position that none of this should have any effect on his position?
I want to live in a free society where it's okay to be wrong.
Nobody ever faces any consequences for having any opinion, but many people very often face consequence for expressing some opinions, in some forums and under certain circumstances. For example, politician are commonly voted out of office, losing their job in the process, for expressing some opinions, and here in the UK even ordinary party members are commonly expelled for expressing some opinions. So even in free democracies, we accept and even expect certain consequences for voicing certain opinions, by certain people, in certain forums, and under certain circumstances. The decision of what those consequences are, and who, why and when they would face them is often made by a particular relevant institution. So it's a matter of degree, not of principle.
This is a huge misunderstanding of the problem with "offensive".
Suppose that at a work meeting, I, the boss or a well-respected engineer, say, "French people are stupid, and their work is subpar; also, they're liars," or something of the sort. At the meeting none of the French employees are present and no one tells them about it. They are not offended personally at all. However, the damage of this offense is not diminished in the least by their absence. It creates a certain dynamic where their colleagues will disrespect them. They're feelings aren't hurt, but the harm against them is real. How are they supposed to "learn to deal with that," being adults and all?
This is what we SJWs mean when we say "offensive," or, more precisely, this is the main issue for us. Not that someone's feelings are hurt, but that they are diminished by the social dynamics that certain statements and behaviors set in motion.
None of the hit piece articles I've read portrayed a true characterization of what he wrote, most presented quotes out of context and instead focused their efforts on colorful commentary to suggest he was somehow in support of child rape - an accusation that's clear to invoke the ire of the masses.
If he were more socially apt maybe he would've known to never share his opinion of what he assumed the thoughts of his late friend were, not even on a private mailing list, unless of course it's to join the chorus of hate and accusations against him.
No, it's not about socially apt, his ideology is rooted too deeply in freedom to say opinions about sensitive issues and rejecting the norm. There were always going to be a lot of opinions "normies" wouldn't like. So the only way out for him was to fight back, attack the attackers, call the media "fake news" and all that.
I admit I haven't been following this news very well so far, so I'm doubtless missing some important facts. I'd heard Stallman was stepping down because of something he said about Minsky, but I have no idea what that was. If this is it, and this article is correct (edit: based on additional info here and elsewhere, it seems Stallman has a long history of questionable behaviour towards women that was also addressed in the initial article, so this new article is omitting quite a bit), then I'm baffled that he has to step down from anything. What he said, that the girl was coerced to appear willing, seems pretty clear to me, and presenting that as him saying that she was actually willing, sounds like a pretty clear and blatant lie to me. Seems worth criticising the organisations that spread that lie.
I'm generally in favour of fighting rape culture and child abuse with all that we've got, and Epstein is clearly pure evil. If Minsky has sex with an underage girl, it doesn't even matter whether she appeared willing or not; that's just wrong. In that sense, Stallman sticking up for his friend was probably not the greatest idea, but if he said she was coerced, and not actually willing, then it's wrong that he should lose his job for saying things he never said.
And yeah, sure, Stallman is a weirdo. Occasionally even a disgusting weirdo maybe (I remember a video where he seemed to pick something from his toes and put it in his mouth), and I recently read a description of events where he publicly embarrassed a woman for being present at a tech related event. (Edit: it seems he has a long history creepiness towards young women, including his students.) If you're gonna fire him, fire him for that, not for something he didn't even say in a private mailing list.
In general, I'm fine with weirdos. We need more of them, not less. Being a weirdo is no excuse to act like an asshole, but on its own it's no reason to ostracise someone.
But this issue? If the description from the article is correct, it seems based on a blatant lie.
Those are also lies, probably. Read all the comments here - or link to an actual instance of "additional info here and elsewhere" and I may be actually able to link you to a denial/ proof that it's fabricated. Eg. the most egregious stuff I've read against him was published by Gruber aka "daringfireball", and were all proven to be shameless lies (and rather obvious and easy to dispel ones, after one learns a bit of history about RMS. Like, that he was never married, wasn't on the board of VA Linux, etc)
These are very different levels of "wrong". Forced sex is much worse than consensual sex.
No basis is offered for why we should think this is "most plausible", except that Stallman likes Minsky and does not think it plausible that he did a bad thing.
There are some summaries which misrepresent what he said, but what he actually said was definitely something people could reasonably object to, especially given the longer context of him saying crazy stuff on related topics before.
And why are you arguing he is pro-rape?
This whole conversation has left a really bad taste for me regarding the HN community, it really sickens me when I see that so many users in here are trying to justify pro-paedophilia quotes, I thought that the lowest this community went was when it witch-hunted a poor guy after the Boston terrorist attack some years ago, but this is on a new other (and sicker) level.
Let them have their own industry.
The MIT and some members of the FSF should be ashamed of themselves.
Never heard anything worthwhile from his critics. It is certainly not Stallman that makes our industry look bad. That is on you and that is all there is to say.
For the positive freedom liberals, diversity of minorities must be enforced and any opinion that may hinder them must be silenced. However, this is taken to a logical extreme.
Every identity must be inclusive and forced to be inclusive and accomodating even if they may be a minority themself.
In the logical extreme, fairness under the legal court is thrown out because the legal court is viewed as corrupt from being staffed with corrupt figures favoring the majority identity.
Extrajudicial means are employed to force minority identities upward because they don't believe that the negative freedom of the free market can allow for that.
Eccentricity is still allowed, however it is a different kind than the one of computer nerds like Richard Stallman. Non-conforming gender identities or images of body beauty are a-okay but not awkward men. The acceptance of the awkward men were a triumph for the awkward men against the neurotypical men, but now they have become seen as the enemy against other minorities because now their cringe-inducing awkwardness is seen as a barrier to entry that drives off neurotypical minorities.
This is all really musical chairs operating under an inherently unjust system and instead of challenging that system, they only challenge the "bad" actors and hope that somehow the system will become more friendly for everyone.
Diversity - I'm fine with a lack of diversity of opinions on whether or not minors can be willing participants in pedophile relationships.
Inclusiveness - Really? Nobody ostracized him because he is an aspie. It is disingenuous to even say that.
Fairness - Nobody fired him, he resigned and let's be honest, the backlash he received was fairly minor. Yes old statements were dug up, but most people are not okay with the statements he made then, they just didn't know about them.
> holier-than-thou hypocritical tell-tales and people who enjoy yielding power over others by drawing lynch-mobs
Who does this label apply to? Anyone who gets upset at a public figure's viewpoints? Where are you personally drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable.
This isn't just about Epstein. Epstein is what brought Stallman's views to the spotlight, but the focus is primarily on former stances on pedophilia he made that are far more damaging things to say than whatever people were saying he said about Epstein or the girls involved with him. Stallman doesn't seem to believe that people can be groomed into appearing like they want to do something when they really don't or aren't aware of the consequences of it.
The very concept of statutory rape reinforces how clear this judgment is. The reference to "statutory" means that the mere facts of the act taking place mean that the conduct is off limits. Things like "consent" or even a misrepresentation of the person's age are generally considered irrelevant.
As a society we've decided that there aren't really exceptions to this. If sex with minors occurs it's not OK, there isn't much need to further investigate why it happened.
Stallman, and anyone else commenting here, has really no basis to claim ignorance of this phenomenally clear social norm, which if broken will result in being fired from just about any public facing institution. It's on a pretty short list of such norms, alongside things like displaying your genitals in a board meeting, ones highly principled views on nudism notwithstanding.
While I appreciate the efforts to make this into some kind of principled argument, I don't find "first they came for the people advocating for sex with minors" to be particularly compelling.
Nobody has suggested he be fined or jailed. His actions just make him unqualified to be a leader. The other people in those organization do get to have a say too you know.
Exactly. There's no need to pretend, as some other comments in here are doing, that he's being hauled off by some sort of cultural police force.
So you're saying that the only people qualified to be "a leader" are the ones who subscribe to your particular flavour of groupthink and no other? Nice thought policing there.
Are you arguing that no social norms violation should ever result in being fired? You can go to work and scream at people at the top of your lungs? Tell the receptionist you’re glad she had a miscarriage? Use the sink as a urinal?
Assuming we agree that at least one or two things may get you fired from your job, it’s then possible to follow up with some observations:
1) Saying it’s ok for adults to fuck minors is definitely on that list
2) I’m ok with that
AFAIK there are plenty of high positioned people in important positions whom have a special preference to something. Whether it be a kink or a total different view/approach on certain topics.
Does that mean we're going to hunt down every one in a high position because they think outside of the box? Because they have a preference to something society seems not normal? Does that mean we'll need to hunt down every thought leader/high positioned CEO/CFO/COO/board member with public appearance that enjoys the occassional whipping?
This topic is pretty disturbing to me personally. Qualified, intelligent people are criticized/publicly shamed for having thoughts/opinions/preferences which have absolutely nothing to do with their occupation.
It feels to me as if we're, as a society, doing anything we can to remove people who think/feel differently from what they're actually good at/dedicated their life to. My thoughts/opinions might not stroke with what people here have written, if what has been reported is true the behavior is not OK but does that mean the man needs to be removed from a position he dedicated his life to?
But if you publicly say stuff like this:
"I think it is morally absurd to define 'rape' in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17."
"I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)"
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] 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."
Then other people might not want to make the highly discretionary decision to let you, specifically, run their organization.
There is a difference between disagreement with a norm (or, in this case, a hypothetical argument that doesn't advocate either way), and a violation. When did Stallman advocate against "fuck[ing] minors"?
The whole point of the concept is that there's no such thing as willingness or consent with minors, that the very nature of the act having taken place constitutes rape.
A statement like "there is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children" means he's saying adults raping children is OK.
He literally wrote that on his blog. It's still there.[0]
I mean, what do you think is going to happen when you do stuff like that?
He definitely has a legal right to do it, and on that I'd defend him to the death. But he doesn't have a legal right to work at MIT or anywhere else that's not comfortable with a leader who says stuff like this.
[0] https://stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_January_2...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-ends-child-marriage-ra...
The same article notes that two states, North Carolina and Alaska have a specified minimum age of 14, and 27 states lack any specific minimum age.
I'm not arguing that the low (or no) minimum age laws are right. I am pointing out that standards, and laws, within the US, and within the past few years, have included marriage, and presumably sexual relations, among minors.
That has been changing, but it's a change that's well within the lifetimes of many adults. Richard Stallman, aged 66, has lived through a period of pretty profound change around many of these norms. Again, not to excuse behaviour, but possibly to explain a possible basis for it.
Strong cultural shifts, should you have the pleasure of living through some yourself, are remarkable to witness and experience.
That leaders should ascribe to societal norms is not always a good outcome. If you want to have revolution, revolutionaries needs to be in place of power/leadership. A society needs to have a mechanism to have such revolutions, or stagnate.
LOL - just because of the particular kind of "groupthink" you're talking about here.
I'd call it gatekeeping. I hear woke people are against this kind of behavior.
I wish that were true, but the sufficiently well-connected and powerful continue not to be brought to account.
Personally I don’t think it’s ethical for an adult to sex with minors. But many countries and states have laws allowing sex with minors. Maybe those communities think it’s ethical, maybe it’s just one of those historical laws they haven’t gotten around to updating with modern ethics.
So I don’t this this topic really has anything to do with pedophilia and how terrible that is.
True, and when squinting, the scenario is understandable: "High profile employee repeatedly receives negative press, so the organization doesn't want to be associated."
They're free to employ and endorse, or end a relationship, with anyone at will (modulo labor laws). The worrying thing here is, despite decades of bad behavior, they didn't distance themselves until he expressed unpopular opinions picked up by social media.
It's like the saying, "The ends don't justify the means." This smacks of letting social media voices have a say in staff choices. Even if most people agree with the outcome, it's the wrong process.
Edits: removing tangents to focus on the points.
> “High profile employee repeatedly receives negative press [ABOUT HIM BEING OK WITH STATUTORY RAPE AND PEDOPHILIA] so the organization doesn't want to be associated."
Yeah that’s pretty much it.
Yet here we all are, with so many people pretending not to understand it.
Legally, frequently you are correct, but not always culturally. To leave Minsky aside, I believe a lot of people accept the misrepresentation argument even when the law doesn't, usually when the ages are close and the minor is somewhere they shouldn't have been allowed. The typical example would be a 20 year old meeting a 17 year old at an 18+ event.
Stallman is an ivory tower thinker. His inability to accept the societal rules you mention are core to him being Stallman. At some point he seems to have decided that his moral philosophy revolves around the concept of harm rather than rules. This is what led him to his earlier posts on incest, sex with minors and necrophilia, if nobody is being harmed then in what way is it wrong? The most obvious answer is that Stallman is incorrect that nobody is being harmed, however I should point out that these topics are actually discussed in related academia (the incest and necrophilia ones are more popular because they doesn't garner the same backlash).
The Minsky issue is complicated by the difference between what Stallman was defending and what now seems to be the actual case. As far as I can tell Giuffre was actually 18 (she was 17 the previous year when she was on the same flight as Minsky) and it seems she didn't actually have sex with Minsky (this isn't clear, she never actually said she did and apparently Minsky mentioned the encounter to people at the time and said he rejected her).
However, Stallman was arguing for the facts as he thought they were, which was that Minsky did have sex with her when she was 17, with her instigating things at Epstein's behest. Stallman was again engaging his ivory tower, questioning how we can call him a rapist if she was 17 but not if she was 18, and how can we blame him for things he didn't know (that she was being coerced). This is exactly how we already knew Stallman thinks. He has ignored some things here, such as what 75 year old Minsky could reasonably believe was going on when an 18 year old came on to him on Epstein's island, but they're facts that could have been pointed out to him and might have changed his opinion. Or perhaps not, if that situation happened to Stallman he might indeed think that finally, after all these years, he has found the cute 18 year old who is into geriatric nerds.
It’s history which has the opportunity of final judgement, and it almost always looks dimly on the moral sensibilities of their predecessors.
Somewhere is a metaphorical Bernie whose career has disappeared, but I’m glad for those people who didn’t hop on political opportunism just because as a messaging and thought leader it’s the strong move which reads the room.
Advocating for adults to rape children, on the other hand, is reprehensible.
Your argument appears to be that there is no way to tell the difference between good things and bad things.
My counterargument is that there are ways to tell the difference. And that when you do, you'll conclude that adults raping children is one of the bad things.
Those politicians which advocate for antagonism against Latinos and other minorities are reading the room too.
Conversely the idea of adults fucking children is not admirable to MIT. So they fired him.
Nobody's talking about censorship, or politicians. We're talking about an organization saying hey we can't have a guy that seems to think adults fucking children is OK being our leader or representative. That's definitely within their rights.
You can try to die on some hill of principle here but 10/10 times if you write blog posts saying something like "hey, so pedophilia is not that big of a deal right?" you're going to have some issues in the professional world.
Not sure why everyone is pretending to be confused.
> Yes, I believe publicly advocating for certain things can severely break cultural norms and make it impossible for you to effectively hold a leadership role in an educational or advocacy setting.
I'd characterize your general approach to the issue as "We don't need to debate the morality of a leader because speaking against norms is already disqualifying."
So do you want to look at a leader based on whether they simply violate social thinking, or do you want to discuss "fucking children"? But if I'm not mistaken, just discussing this matter for you is a kind of disqualification. And here you are, basically saying that other people are advocating for pedophelia and fucking kids. Is that your instinct for speech? Do you just want to talk <at> people?
Bernie Sanders spoke for gay rights at a time when it was a bad issue for any candidate. The advice for him as a campaign consultant would be to shutup, wouldn't it? Is this not a leadership sin?
Pol Pot advocated genocide. That was bad because genocide is bad.
Richard Stallman argued that pedophila was OK.
Pedophilia is not OK. It’s really far from OK. Hence the problem.
Perhaps you think it’s actually OK as well. Then the two of you agree. If you also advocate for pedophilia in public you may find people don’t want to hire you as well.
All this talk of formerly unpopular opinions and leadership only makes sense if you think that the underlying problematic opinion will be vindicated by history, like the other examples cited.
I think it won’t.
You’re saying this:
> We don't need to debate the morality of a leader because speaking against norms is already disqualifying
Nope. Didn’t say that. I said this specific norm is well founded and valid.
You can’t debate the morality of a leader’s statements in the abstract. There’s no generic class of “norms” there’s just the facts in question.
Some statements are morally defensible, some aren’t.
Saying it’s OK for adults to have sex with children is a problem, it’s gong to upset people and make them not trust you and be leery of having you represent them.
As literally everyone knows.
If that was intentional the you are lying.
If it was not intentional the it's ironic that you are so sloppy and cavalier in your wording on a topic which is all about precision in language.
Please stop.
Any sex between adults and minors is rape, that's what the concept of statutory rape means. He has expressed that those interactions could be mitigated by "willing" and "voluntary" actions by the children, and that in those situations there's no real harm done.
That's literally what he said. He's completely and totally within his rights to say that. I will support his rights to the death. But that saying shit like that is going to get you socially shunned, predictably, and I'm fine with a society that does that.
Society, and the groups he leads, have the right to find those statements reprehensible and cut ties with him. And I think they should.
I mean what's the counterargument that you're making, that he only kind of implied that raping kids was OK? That he merely insinuated it? That his suggestion that pedophilia was not that big of a deal fell short of actual advocacy?
Assuming you successfully win the argument that there's an important distinction here how does that change the answer?
The core point I've attempted to make is that if you write blog posts about how kids getting fucked by adults is no big deal you might lose your job.
Do you find that concept confusing? I bet you don't. Nobody really does. He knew he was going to make people upset saying that and didn't care. That, in fact, is likely why he did it.
Eventually, his actions had consequences.
You do understand that rape can't be voluntary, and voluntary sex is not a rape?
>Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without that person's consent.
It's in the definition. If there is a consent, there is no rape.
Hence, Stallman is not advocating for rape.
You seem to classify statutory rape as a subcategory of "rape", and thus I am assuming you would be perfectly content calling anyone convicted of statutory rape a rapist. This is semantically unhelpful. "Rape" is widely understood to mean violent rape, and statutory rape is legally (and to most people, morally) the lesser crime.
There may be cases where even you might find it desirable to make a distinction in language between someone advocating for "violent rape is ok", and someone arguing for example that the existing age of consent in their country should not be increased, which requires acknowledging that the two are really distinct things.
This is a very new and very strange trend to redefine all teenagers as children and the moral panic around this is interesting to say the least. The extreme backlash against any slight questioning of this is likewise something people should be skeptical about.
Your counter-examples are historically poor choices as 50 years ago (less in many parts of the US) the majority of people would have seen homosexuality as a perversion indistinguishable from pedophilia (attraction to pre-pubescent children, not 17 years olds), and miscegenation, a word we don't even use any more, would have held the same status if you go back just a bit further.
Again, 50 years ago you could just have been one of the people who would have said "... you'll conclude that sodomy is one of the bad things" or go back another 50 and "... you'll conclude that intermixing pure blood is one of the bad things"
This moral absolutism is definitely not part of a "bright line" in our culture, and its sudden and rapid emergence needs both more questioning and more understanding. Of course anyone who proposes this is a "child rapist" in your view so we likely won't get much discourse on this topic anytime soon.
"Age of consent laws vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, though most jurisdictions set the age of consent in the range 14 to 18"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent
Things just got a lot murkier, didn't they. Actually, they have always been a lot murkier. Because "our culture" isn't actually homogenous. And these things have changed a lot over time.
> Expressing doubt about this cultural norm
Well, which norm excactly? The one at 14? Or the one at 18?
"some jurisdictions may also make allowances for minors engaged in sexual acts with each other, rather than a single age."
Murkier.
"There are many "grey areas" in this area of law, some regarding unspecific and untried legislation, others brought about by debates regarding changing societal attitudes, and others due to conflicts between federal and state laws. These factors all make age of consent an often confusing subject, and a topic of highly charged debates"
Are all the people in a society that has the 14 boundary horrible beyond the pale?
Or maybe things are a bit more complicated than you make them out to be.
It is not at all a very bright line when you can legally have sex with a consenting 16 year old in West Wendover, NV but be a criminal for the same act with a 17 year old in what is essentially the same city of Wendover, UT.
Assuming that by "bright line" you're not referring to the boundary separating Nevada from Utah.
But all of that is just the disparity between two states in the same country! That "bright line" gets even fuzzier when you factor in the global age of consent: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Age_of_Consent.png
It wasn't just awkward demeanor. He actively made women feel unwelcome in the workplace and behaved unprofessionally over and over again.
> He held his positions at MIT, GNU, and the FSF for over thirty years, and in that time nobody accused him of coercion, unwanted touching, or verbal harassment
Yes, because of people like you, Geoff. When people like Stallman behave like they do and say the things they say they don't have to face the consequences because people don't want to speak up, because they're afraid of being called liars or censors. That's how authority figures and popular individuals keep getting away with it.
The second paragraph of the post is irrelevant and further proves the point. Stallman's contributions to free software don't excuse his conduct.
That was sarcasm, because apparently in 2019 that's an acceptable thing to say with a straight face.
So, like those people you seem to applaud did to Stallman?
>apparently in 2019 that's an acceptable thing to say with a straight face
Oh, the irony...
Invoking <current year> isn't usually said with a straight face anymore.
Every episode I read about fell into the category of "socially awkward adult male". If we can't, as a group, tolerate awkwardness, we are very much down the rabbit hole of mandatory social conformity.
By all means, point me to a real abuse scenario by Stallman. I like being proven wrong.
~edit: I have included the full quote below as I did not intend to twist/misrepresent in any way.
Stallman writes: " The term is applied to a broad range of actions, ranging from stealing a kiss to rape, as well as other things in between. It acts as propaganda for treating them the same.
There seems to be an exception for TSA agents, however.
The term is further stretched to include sexual harassment, which is not a specific act, but rather a pattern of acts that amounts to a form of gender bias. Gender bias is rightly prohibited in certain situations for the sake of equal opportunity.
I don't think that rape should be treated like stealing a kiss, so I reject the term "sexual assault" completely."
> Sexual assault: The term is applied to a broad range of actions, ranging from stealing a kiss to rape, as well as other things in between. It acts as propaganda for treating them the same.
On one side, you indeed quote Stallman itself and the source of the quote. On the other side the complete quote reads:
The term is applied to a broad range of actions, ranging from stealing a kiss to rape, as well as other things in between. It acts as propaganda for treating them the same.
There seems to be an exception for TSA agents, however.
The term is further stretched to include sexual harassment, which is not a specific act, but rather a pattern of acts that amounts to a form of gender bias. Gender bias is rightly prohibited in certain situations for the sake of equal opportunity.
I don't think that rape should be treated like stealing a kiss, so I reject the term "sexual assault" completely.
In fact, IMO, I agree that using "sexual assault" for something other than rape / attempt of, is depreciating the full meaning of the term and victims are normally the first ones to be affected by it. I do agree that other crimes, born from gender inequality, are very serious as well - that doesn't mean, we should bundle them up. How would society react, if slaps started to be prosecuted as attempted murders?
If I see a problem with his characterization of the term "sexual assault" / his reasoning in rejecting it, it's that the "broad range of actions" he says are labeled with the term "sexual assault" share one common trait: they happened without the consent of one party. He kind of ignores this in favour of describing the term as "propaganda for treating [acts of non-rape] as the same". And I find the argument that "one unwanted act that I and presumably others find mostly harmless was described as sexual assault, thus this term has lost its meaning in general" somewhat hard to swallow.
Wikipedia: "Sexual assault is an act in which a person intentionally sexually touches another person without that person's consent, or coerces or physically forces a person to engage in a sexual act against their will."[1]
If we did away with the term "sexual assault", I'm not sure what terms we would be left with when describing such things, except to describe the exact acts themselves.
In fact, I'm not sure if I buy the idea that "the term sexual assault is losing/has lost its meaning because it used to mean rape" at all, because there has always been a word for that: rape. As far as I know, this term has always existed to describe a broad-range of sexual acts performed without consent.
> I don't think that rape should be treated like stealing a kiss, so I reject the term "sexual assault" completely.
From my understanding, he disagrees with the term because it is imprecise, and the greater of two evils might be mixed up with the lesser - with the result that the greater evil might be perceived as less evil as it actually is.
(Edit: A sibling comment gets the above thought better, describing it as an "umbrella term".)
The way you quote him, you try (seem to) to imply that he thinks there is no such thing denoting "sexual assault". Or using the same logical reasoning: Are you, spats1990, implying that rape should be treated like "stealing a kiss"? I doubt you are, but I strongly doubt he does either.
As I wrote in my reply to the post you're referring to, I seem to think that the term sexual assault is necessarily imprecise--but in another sense, it isn't imprecise at all, as all the acts described by it share a single commonality, which is lack of consent.
We cannot know what he thought, and we cannot even ask since he is dead, and we did not even know what actually happened after she "offered" herself (unwillingly and coerced by Epstein, of course).
If it were, who needs legislature?
RMS claimed it was plausible that she presented herself to Minsky as willing, due to coercion by Epstein.
There's a big difference.
Reportedly, Minsky did suspect that something was amiss and refused the offer.
Did you even bother to read the emails or at the very least the article? This misconception is exactly what's being argued there, that Stallman said something clearly different.
> Ignoring a legal age of consent
By doing what, raping someone underage? Or rather expressing his opinion that it's ridiculous that when in one state the age of consent is 16, in another one it's 18, and yet people are judged morally and criminally for failing to distinguish between these two? So basically what you're saying is that possessing a non-standard opinion and criticizing existing laws should make you a non-person. I believe you'd feel very much at home in the USSR, the communist party had the same ideas.
I read here on HN a few days ago that the dude in question, TURNED THE GIRL DOWN. How people are crucifying two people (Stallman and the dead guy) for underage rape that never happened is just crazy.
See how badly critics blasted dave chappel for his new show, despite the audience loving the jokes (even if they were edgy, they were done in good taste, and pin-pointed a problem that society at large refuses to comment or talk about).
if it's OK for the charming, suave guy to do it, then the issue exists at the "victim", not the "perpetrator".
Rule of law is meant to make life more fair, and this isn't a lesson, but it is something for society to improve on.
I was saying that it isn't ok for the charming, suave guy to do it either.
Which seem to go against all goals of diversity and inclusiveness. If we strive for more diverse community we have accept quirks of some people. Only in purely homogeneous group everybody can be comfortable and not offended.
Midly Autistic, not-good-looking man: Shows signs of autism
Society: "No! Not like that! Kill it! Kill it!"
Honestly curious, when did he say that?
> 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.
https://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html
> 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.
In this specific example he is not against rape because he is trying to redefine rape to make his colloeague look less guilty of rape.
In general, if you have any sources for your claims feel free to share them (I can't find any sources quoting stallman saying anything that vaguely resembles a pro-rape argument, and I've gone through most comments in the section).
More specifically, Stallman didn't ever say that raping children doesn't harm them, if your definition of rape is sex without consent (that's the legal definition in my country). He said that if you have consensual sex with a minor then that may not be harmful for him/her (the fact that this is not "raping children" follows from the very definition of rape).
I'm trying to leave my feelings aside but you really seem to be misquoting Stallman to try to make a point. I really hope I'm wrong about this so I'm genuinely curious about what did you mean when you said he stated that "raping children doesn't harm them".
Stallman didn't care.
People, even many of the ones advocating for inclusivity, are extremely unforgiving of autistic traits and will dogpile on any social faux-pass accidentally made.
There's a difference between tolerating it to a degree and letting leaders continue uncomfortable awkwardness. If it's enough to distance people, maybe they're not a great candidate for a leader. That doesn't remove anything from their achievements and abilities to contribute or to spread new ideas. The post says "If an occasional social gaffe or failed attempt at humor is all it takes to get thrown out on the street" - entirely omitting the space occupied by almost all of us: between homelessness and being a leader of a global movement/organisation.
We can at the same time tolerate awkwardness and hold our local and global leaders to high standards.
Isn't the whole point of a 'leader' that they challenge the status quo not bite their tongue to follow it?
There's lots of leaders who love the status quo and organise people around it. No challenging needed. (for example priests being leaders for a small local community)
This isn't the followers saying "no, that's not ok", this is large institutions saying "no" on behalf of a vocal few.
Despite how you are dancing around responses, from where I see it: You are clearly denying him a platform by saying he shouldnt be a 'leader' (ie. keep his posts). You are making that decision by institutions instead of individuals. You are holding all the worlds 'leaders' to your own moral views which is logically inconsistent.
His reputation was set on fire and burned to the ground, he was expelled from his life's work, might even have become homeless as a direct result, and most of the people he considered friends or friendly vanished over night (tho, some remain as you pointed out, but decidedly few) destroying most of his social (support) network.
Exactly, is it hard to imagine he doesn't want to take a blow torch to his own creation just as a last "fuck you" farewell?
>happy to semi-publically state his opinions about sexual assault
He said sexual assault is bad. How dare he?!
There's plenty of troubling stuff in his writing.
If you find anything else he's said troubling please provide me some references as I'm trying to read anything that may help me to understand this episode. (I've already read about his former and present opinions on paedophilia)
You are saying that socially awkward people shouldn't be leaders. RMS can't change, he isn't socially awkward by choice. That's his personality.
I disagree. Leaders have flaws, and social awkwardness isn't anywhere near the top of the worst flaws. In fact, in RMS' case, I think it was part of the reason for his success in promoting free software.
Honestly, they got him because they could. There's plenty of politicians, including state heads, regularly making offensive and sexist comments. I haven't seen anyone attempting or even proposing a coup because of that. It usually gets a day or two on the news, and then is remembered only in jokes.
> That doesn't remove anything from their achievements and abilities to contribute or to spread new ideas.
Of course it does, because being a leader is the ability "to contribute or to spread new ideas". Moreover, in this particular case, we're hearing plenty of voices trying to retroactively deny RMS's achievements.
> entirely omitting the space occupied by almost all of us: between homelessness and being a leader of a global movement/organisation.
In this particular case, it was a jump over that space occupied by almost all of us. In a blink of an eye, this incident made an old person not employable and apparently (according to the TFA) homeless. Maybe a different, more emotionally and intellectually balanced person could handle this and resume a fulfilling but low-profile life. But such people don't generally end up with achievements or roles as RMS did. It takes a pretty unbalanced person to persist in pushing views that go against the commercial zeitgeist so long, so successfully, and without compromise.
He already entered his retirement age. (Unless I miscalculated) He's a clever man - if he's got no retirement fund, or stable accommodation by now, that's a different issue and only brought forwards faster, not created now.
I mean, if the accommodation was provided entirely unofficially by MIT this whole time and was yanked away without warning, I really sympathise. But I find that idea unlikely without some good confirmation.
Perhaps you need to read about more episodes:
> I worked 10 years ago at VA Linux which had Richard Stallman on its board of directors. You might have heard that Stallman applied his open source ideas to his publicly open marriage as well. The problem was that he was more than open. He made overt sexual advances to women at work. 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. He was a creep and women at the company knew to stay away.
* https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrac...
I haven't read the description of anything that resembles sexual abuse by RMS.
(edited to remove an unintended reference to sexual assault)
The excerpt is from an e-mail that John Gruber received in 2011. It is the written testimony of someone who witnessed the events in question first hand.
Given this, I'd expect (A) this is close to the worst concrete evidence that one can find on Stallman's misbehaviours, everywhere; and (B ) it's not exactly unbiased. Sure it sounds bad, but I would like details. Because at the same time, there's also this tale that sounds a lot more objective, verifiable & facts-based https://archive.is/7qepC. E.g :
> One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of MIT, was the degree of participation by women. In the tiny society that was then the FSF, women were more prominent than I had seen in Silicon Valley, or acadamia prior. 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.
It somewhat makes me think that, coming from the greatest Apple fanboy ever, Gruber forgot that on many accounts Steve Jobs too had a personal hygiene problem.
If we don’t have a specific account and details are unknown, then I don’t think this is a fair characterization.
Ive had others think Stallman is creepy too. They actively avoided him, but he never did anything to them.
Sexual advances in and of themselves are not illegal - but again we don’t have a true source for this information. Assuming this is all 100% factually accurate and the sentiment is properly related: it sounds Inappropriate, but if he wasn’t fired, it sounds like it wasn’t far enough outside the acceptable conduct to warrant anything.
That's not how things work. Workplace "justice" is quite dependent on things like internal politics and personal affiliations. You can't rely tell how bad something was by the disciplinary response.
1. As far as I can tell, he was never on the board of VA Linux.
2. RMS was never married. https://www.quora.com/Is-Richard-Stallman-married
3. It is a widely known that if anyone ever associates RMS with "open source", he will interject to say that he vehemently disagrees with open source and had nothing to do with its creation. The fireball guy who posted this story, clearly knows very little of RMS to post this without mentioning the fact that this part absolutely is false.
4. He dislikes the word "open" in general, and would never ever use it to describe anything he was involved in. Again, key fact that is clearly false.
5. RMS does not usually have bad hygiene.
6. One of the people who coined "open source" was involved with VA Linux, his name was Eric S Raymond. Perhaps this this is about him.
He does, actually. But yes, the story is most likely about ESR, and he's been quite open about his polyamorous relationships.
> followed up with a post relaying numerous first-hand reports from women subjected to Stallman’s harassment. One example:
The example it then lists (about Stallman at a buffet lunch) is the only "first-hand" report of harassment contained in the follow-up post. This is actually pivotal to the whole daringfireball post as he is purporting to have an ironclad case of harassment but there's only a single first-person account and an email he received about something happening to somebody else at VA Linux (I can't find any reference for Stallman ever being on the board of directors at VA Linux, although they changed their name a number of times which doesn't make things any easier).
Eric S. Raymond ("ESR") was an author of the Open Source Definition and a member of the VA Linux board:
https://www.linux.com/news/eric-raymond-responds-changes-va-...
I find no current links indicating Stallman was ever on the VA Linux, or any other corporate board. Neither his personal bio nor Wikipedia bio mention any.
This sword cuts both ways.
MIT is not a kindergarten, they are adult people moving in an adult work context.
It has been said here, that some women are so terrified of Stallman that will carry plants around with they. If true this would speak volumes but not about RMS; about those women!
I assume that there are a lot of very smart but socially awkward people (men and women) in MIT. Excentricity and twisted humour is not a trait exclusive of men. Sex jokes are not exclusive of men. A fully growth women, so terrified of any contact with men to barricade herself behind a geranium all day, should raise a red flag. Maybe somebody in the administration could stop chasing the "big bad men" and kindly try to help this women to improve her social skills instead.
Dealing with sex and relationships is part of being an adult. Any adult women should be able to stop and deal elegantly with an undesired proposition. Men act nervous, clumsy and awkward all the time when try to develop a romantic relationship. This does not convert them in monsters. Is just the human nature.
Just a smile and a "thanks, but not thanks" should be enough, and this is a skill that can be learned also.
Cool victim blaming.
> Any adult women should be able to stop and deal elegantly with an undesired proposition.
They're in a professional environment, they shouldn't have to deal with this.
Tell that to all the millions of people who are happily married to people they met in professional environments.
Ahh, cool, so we can keep harassing women insofar as there are sometimes positive benefits.
For many people, the workplace is where they spend the largest chunk of their life and thus the primary method of socializing and developing relationships.
There are workplaces where this is inappropriate. There are situations, such as imbalances of power, making this inappropriate. But it is far less appropriate, edging on trolling, for you to categorize every single work relationship as "women being harassed in the workplace".
Do know it is possible to develop a romantic relationship without harassing the other person. If you're not acquainted with the method, for the sake of your potential partners, please familiarize yourself.
Try reading my post again, my dude. Maybe go a little slower. Read it backwards to forwards, forwards to backwards, and then try setting aside ideological goggles for a second.
We're talking about a workplace where women are doing something completely and totally bizarre: they're carrying around plants so they don't have to engage with someone. There's no situation in which that isn't totally bizarre--people don't just walk around with potted plants for the fun of it.
So, I say, "Hey, maybe they shouldn't have to deal with this," yet I'm the one who needs to "familiarize yourself." What a deranged cadre of people the lot of you are--you're so desperate to explain away this abuse that you can't even keep the context of a thread only 3 or 4 posts deep.
When you replied to that post, you stopped talking about MIT and Stallman, and you addressed a general situation: "Is it okay to have romantic relationships in the workplace". Maybe you should quit jumping on the opportunity to call people deranged/desperate/whatever and revise your own posts, because it's possible you're in the wrong.
Not. We need to use the correct terms. Victim blaming would be suggesting that the woman triggered the situation somehow. I'm not saying this at all.
I'm talking about the reaction. IF that history was real [and not just a silly rumour] then we must notice that there is more than a people acting weird here. To freak out and carry an antiviolator house plant because you received a twisted visit card with dirty humour, once, well... this is not normal either, IMHO.
> They're in a professional environment, they shouldn't have to deal with this.
Fair point. 100% agree with that, but if you put several adult people in a room, they will inevitably try to develop relationships.
There is also no reason that "male" should be a relevant qualifier.
> OP: "CBP waved me through with hardly a word last week (TSA did grumble at me, for not moving fast enough through their fondling queue)." > > RMS: I generally ask, "Could I please be checked by a woman? It's not fair that only gays get to enjoy this."
I don't have a link, but I have not seen this one grow or change at all, everyone referring to it refers to the same thing.
And that one is pretty damn creepy.
Can you please cite your sources for this claim?
I doubt Stallman was any more unpleasant to women than to men, or showed any greater or lesser social graces. He has never, ever held back about any of his opinions or actions. I’m sure you could get him to admit to things that would get almost anyone fired by most jobs in under ten minutes and he wouldn’t deny any of it afterwards.
People like Stallman don’t do professional because he’s not a faker. He’s not trying to make money or buy prestige. He just wants free software.
Oh this is hilarious. Do you realize how many people -- not just men -- in CS, physics, mathematics are autistic, especially in places like MIT? Places like that are teeming with autistic people who somehow manage not to make their students and colleagues uncomfortable. I'll even be so bold as to claim neurotypicals are actually a minority in some of those subjects.
This is really strange atempt to spin his firing as some sort of evidence that autistic men are being oppressed in CS academia and tech. As anyone who's been in either of those environmets, that's clearly NOT the case.
The idea that autistic people do not make allistic people uncomfortable is completely at odds with my experience. The more obviously autistic someone is the less allistic people want to be near them. People who are crushing monomaniacal bores with poor social skills are tolerated if they have some valuable skills, keep to themselves, or parrot the party line.
Autistic people can make allistic people uncomfortable by sitting quietly in the corner of a room. They look funny, they stim, they do that flappy thing with their hands, or rock.
Stallman wasn’t oppressed. He was booted for being a huge outspoken driven asshole with no political nous, but he’s been a huge outspoken equal opportunity asshole for decades.
The problem is you are attributing the low end of high functioning with all of them. Either you have also met autistic people much closer to normal than that, or you simply haven't noticed them because you can't tell the difference.
>I’m not saying he’s oppressed. He’s a super giant nerd and people don’t like nerds
At some point most people mature enough to realize that everyone's a nerd about something and stop caring. Most people with a college education and an actual career end up meeting all sorts of people and realizing that cliques are stupid. There are still some high schoolesque antics at every company, but generally that has been my experience.
Do you have any citations for that (for the fact that there's a significant proportion of autistic people who study/work at the MIT)? It's come up a few times in the comment section of this article, and I can't find sources for that claim.
Honestly the first time I read it I dismissed it as an exaggeration, but you (and others) seem convinced enough to use it to back some of your opinions on this topic. Before this, I would've thought that thoughts like that were merely stereotypes result of ignorance.
[1]https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8d4e/4958856859323ecacca918...
> Stereotype (In)Accuracy in Perceptions of Groups and Individuals
> Are stereotypes accurate or inaccurate? We summarize evidence that stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable findings in social psychology. We address controversies in this literature, including the long-standing and continuing but unjustified emphasis on stereotype inaccuracy, how to define and assess stereotype accuracy, and whether stereotypic (vs. individuating) information can be used rationally in person perception. We conclude with suggestions for building theory and for future directions of stereotype (in)accuracy research.
This is an incredibly ignorant opinion. Lots of high functioning autistic people develop reasonable social skills. People still probably notice if they hang around with us long enough, but non-shitty people (aka apparently almost everyone but you) don't default to thinking they are creepy perverts that they must escape from.
Some autistic people are so socially stunted that they have trouble interacting with people at all, but there are a lot of us that have successful careers, friends, wives, etc. We're a little weird but most of us aren't freaks. Try having some compassion.
If by some chance you have formed this opinion due to a personal struggle with autism. Theres ways to learn decent social skills.
I don’t think autistic people are creepy perverts. I think that normal people pretty much automatically think they’re creepy because there’s something off about the way they interact socially. The degree of offness varies but if you never had it you were never autistic.
If you’re under the impression people are accepting go to an autism or asperger’s support group. You will be quickly disabused of your high opinion of humanity.
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/04/24/on-stimming-a...
> Being able to pass as nonautistic is an important skill. We live in a world full of people who hate autistic people. Other people find the natural way our bodies move to be upsetting or repulsive to look at. It is not realistic to expect nonautistic people to change, so those of us who can acquire the skill of passing will often be better able to achieve our goals if we can pass.
I don't know that there's a better way for society to accept us than for us to do our best to learn normal social behavior and for them to be understanding when they see that we're trying, even if we fail. Surely you don't expect normal people to just get constantly insulted forever to spare the feelings of a tiny percentage of the population.
And obviously due to variance, bad luck, ignorant local populations/culture, etc, some autistic people will inevitably have a worse experience with people than mine.
I said Stallman was an equal opportunity autistic asshole rather than a sexual predator. You impugned my social skills.
I never said people felt threatened by autistic people. They’re disgusted. Just like fat or ugly people. People aren’t creeped out by scary, violent men, they’re afraid of them. Being creeped out is about disgust, not fear.
I have no comment about society because that’s every individual’s own problem, just like being fat or ugly. No one except maybe your family and friends care, so deal with it or suffer or deal with it and suffer. But don’t sugar coat it and pretend things are ok and people are nice. This is a fallen world and if you find your way into a pleasant part it’s through continuous, vigourous effort.
Neurotypical people don’t like autistic people, and would prefer to avoid them to the greatest extent possible.
The other extreme is the way you interpret my statements to mean that I have some delusionally idealistic view of humanity. Reality lies between your overly bleak assessment of average people and the perfectly accepting world you mistakenly attributed to me.
I acknowledge that some people are jerks. However, most people try to get along with people when they interact with them. The people who don't, or who are unusually bad at it are often the neurotypical people.
The word creepy can mean fear or disgust. Frequently in the context of women thinking a guy is a creep, they mean some amount of both. If that's not what you meant, fair enough.
Are you disgusted by fat people, the mentally disabled, or people that aren't beautiful? I don't think that's as normal as you seem to think it is.
There are verifiable prejudices towards overweight people but you make it sound like people can't stand to see them.
Also, don't you think all sorts of self-help groups are self selecting for people with negative experiences?
Please elaborate?
You are making me feel unwelcome on this forum and your comment is unprofessional.
> Yes, because of people like you, Geoff. When people like Stallm ....
It's because of people like you that allegations ruin people's life.
When there's nothing to prove, you are talking about what could have
lies where told. There are plenty people afraid of pointing this out, lest they be called an "apologist" for something. Is that because of "people like you, Barrin92"?
How do you know this? How do you know that he deliberately tries to make women uncomfortable? I don't think any women is comfortable near a fat, bearded virgin that eats things off his foot, but to accuse him of deliberately making women uncomfortable implies that he knows some of his actions are off limits and he's deliberately crossing the line. You're just attributing malice when there's a simple answer - he's socially awkward, he doesn't know what the limits are.
He doesn’t do it deliberately (probably). The accusations are only that he does it.
> I don't think any women is comfortable near a fat, bearded virgin that eats things off his foot
None of the things you just listed were part of the reasons they gave.
> but to accuse him of deliberately making women uncomfortable
Again – deliberate not necessary for this to be a bad thing.
In case you haven’t seen it and/or for your browsing convenience, here’s a link to the main set of actual issues in question: https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendi... (the fact that I’m linking this doesn’t mean I agree with every word of it or take its truth as a given, by the way – just pointing out that you’re arguing against a non-position)
There are good reasons to defend (some of) Stallman's behavior, saying he don't know better is not one of them. If anything, it only makes me feel better about his current situation: Oh, the whole problem is that he didn't knew what he was doing? Well, he's learning a hell of a lesson now.
If you have something to share, put the effort to be specific. Now you are just throwing general accusations.
I don't see why you have to attack the author here, but let me ask you this -- if I "feel" unwelcomed by your conduct, for whatever reason, on a "private" mailing list, then should you be forced to resign?
I would not call it anything less than a disgrace for anyone involved.
On the other hand, so far, no one has come forward to denounce anything (harassment or similar) about Stallman.
It seems to me that Stallman's lack of social adherence is the reason why he's being attacked. Not actual facts.
All this is irrelevant to the quite real and undeniable truth that it's not because he "made women feel unwelcome in the workplace" that he was sacked. This is pure after-the-fact rationalization. He was sacked for having the wrong opinion and not knowing when to shut up.
Such intentional smear campaign makes me seriously question the author of the piece, because if they had an obvious case of wrongdoing, no such intentional misquoting would indeed be necessary.
I'm 6 foot+ and 200 pounds+. I make certain women uncomfortable simply by existing. They will view every action I take through a lens of being frightened and intimidated.
Do I deserve to get fired? Obviously not.
I have also had different women ask me to join a meeting because the audience wasn't listening to them because they were so physically small. They needed someone with authority to say "shut up and listen". Those women have no issues with me whatsoever and enlist my assistance
Clearly the problem isn't with me, should the women frightened of me get fired instead? Obviously not.
Now what?
It seems to me that the exact opposite is happening here. He is "hunted" because of his uncompromising stance on freedom for software users. The eccentricity is just an excuse, useful to gather a horde of angry people, but inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
If anything, I'd almost agree on the fact that RMS made (as ironic as this sounds) selling free software more difficult than if it was any standard corporate drone in his place. He's a great idealist, but he's not really good at selling things...
I'm tempted to agree with you that he might have made it more difficult. It's not just the message you use to sell something, it's also the way in which. If people associate FSF too much with RMS it could be harmful for FSF, because they'll assume it just appeals to the 'eccentric bunch'.
I submit that you cannot have innovation without inconvenient characters. You must allow a plurality of ideas and ideals to exist, even those that you find dumb or repulsive.
I don't personally like RMS very much, he seems like an annoying person, but he should not have had his life ruined for what amounted to an pedantic argument on a mailing list.
This cultural moment is mostly a US thing, and to a lesser extent an Anglosphere thing, with especially English proficient vassal states like the Dutch or Scandinavians also taking part. If it ever burns out in the US it’ll just disappear everywhere else in short order.
RMS life was not ruined for an argument on a mailing list, but because he has no allies because he’s constitutionally incapable of playing politics.
You did not frame it that way, which I really appreciate, because I view myself as a leftist, but find these groups detrimental.
I refer to them as sofa activists, whose goal in life is to feel good, without actually doing anything that can't be done from the comfort of their sofa, that is most impactful, worthy changes.
In fact RMS himself is a leftist. The woke group is extremely vocal and extremely damaging to the left-wing movements worldwide, but it is still a minority.
1. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Logical conclusion: To be intolerant of intolerance is a moral virtue.
I am having trouble deciding if this is a race to the top or bottom.
Now let's address the underlying point: You don't get X good thing without Y bad behaviour. I don't agree with this. It's a weird sort of blackmail "Put up with my bad behaviour because you need me". Firstly, For all we know, if we had been less tolerant of bad treatment of people in the free software movement, it'd be a much more powerful movement today than if we had allowed a small number of toxic individuals to take leadership roles and drive out many potential contributors. I see that as no less likely than the scenario put out in this defense.
Secondly, this attitude shifts the responsibility away from the individual for their actions. If someone has a lot to contribute but it never happens because their attitude sucks, that's on them. It's not on us to enable them.
Consider the following: Humans have limited capacity, thus time, money and energy spent limiting Y inhibits resources available to creating X.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule
* https://hbr.org/2007/03/why-i-wrote-the-no-asshole-rule
* https://www.td.org/insights/dont-tolerate-brilliant-jerks
* https://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/why-netflix-doesn-t-toler...
I can't see how packaging insults as a solution improves anything.
2) Not all people have an easy time learning not to be an asshole (and some literally can't). Thus, the resource-cost varies.
3) If one is just blunt, people can often misinterpret that as being an asshole. But factually, the blunt person is just blunt, and the "victim" is just disgruntled, which, at least in my opinion, makes the "victim" the actual asshole if he decides to judge the blunt person because of that.
There are certainly many assholes who deserve to be criticized, but we should allow the benefit of doubt to all parties first.
They argue with a single example of how getting rid of a salesman at a company, who was an asshole, but had great results, that the following year, the company's revenue went up (correlation does not imply causation). Then, OTOH, they argue that every company needs a "token asshole" citing Steve Jobs as an example (in direct contradiction to the previous cited example).
On the whole, there doesn't seem to be enough scientific evidence to support the anti-asshole sentiment, just a bunch of opinions, hamstrung with authoritative arguments.
I'd refer again to the drill sergeant as a hyperbole as to why some people are assholes, and how it serves the greater good in defiance to the brunt of people having to accept such assholery.
Or in other words, a person who is brilliant thanks to his lack of common sense would not have been brilliant if he had common sense. And convincing a person without common sense that learning common sense would be good for him is very hard, most likely he will just ignore it like he did all other common sense things he have been told to do in his life. Therefore it is inevitable that asshole leaders who lack common sense will continue to appear and thrive, because those with common sense can't do the job.
Better yet, consider the following: things are more complicated that ridiculous oversimplification.
Happens in the corporate world all the time though, was Microsoft ever really punished (beyond a wrist slap) for it's antitrust? Steve Jobs was notoriously a pedantic asshole, who gets to punish that?
I think the word "toxic" (people/places/cultures) is becoming vague and overused to the point of becoming the new badspeak - Can we just dismiss Stallman as "toxic"? Is the lynch-mob/fact-poor culture attacking Stallman not also "toxic"?
Now he had an error. The error that doesn't make sense to him but obviously the SIC is not happy but instead of trying to dig into his algorithms they try to argue with the compiler.
Good luck with that.
It's not on you, maybe, but I'd be willing to put up with somebody's shit if they get the job done. And especially then if no one else has gotten it done so far.
Einstein bonked his cousin. And postulated the Theories of Relativity. Yeah, you'd think he could've thought of a better name.
I care about results, if someone's nice, that's a bonus. But don't deny the fact either, that some people will be nice because they need to hide an incompetence. I know, and they know, if you have the results, that that is the most important thing, being nice is optional. Not being nice also does not imply being rude, just neutral, by the way.
EDIT: And as a German, I'm intrinsically aware of the stereotype that we're often labelled as "rude", when we're actually being direct. So, who's at fault here? No one is, but we'd all go a long way to take a step back and realize, what's actually going on.
EDIT2: And I also often have to put up with the reverse of this, people who are so goddamned nice, I can't be mad at them for any longer than a few seconds, but basically can't get shit done. As an employee who often had to clean-up after others, I often got pissed at this, but fortunately, that's no longer my case.
I should've been more precise in this: Seemingly terrible people deserve an accurate evaluation that does not rely on "feelings" or the lynch-mob.
Definitions of an "ass(hole)" are pretty subjective, and the tolerances here vary far greater than those that are racist or sexist. You shouldn't mix them up.
This is, of course, different from being blunt, quiet, or other sorts of personality quirks people can associate negatively with. But I would say the line between proper and improper workplace behavior is more defined than people think.
I think the fear you are bringing up is the slippery slope into people being fearful of every interaction, but that will always need to be managed just like privacy and security and there will never be a one size fits all. But there certainly can be some pretty simple baselines established. Unions do it all the time - to varying degrees of success.
You are totally correct.
I see no reason to tolerate people that go around lying and digging dirt in order to defame people...
I also see no reason to tolerate people that blindly jump on rumours in order to push their political goals.
I definitively see no reason to tolerate people that seek to erode principles of justice on which our society is founded.
It's not just about one incidence of some mistakenly pedantic comments, as has been made clear by many, many people. It's a pattern of behaviour over years combined with no interest in listening to other people or accepting that he might be in the wrong. His behaviour towards women in particular has resulted in a lot of people sharing stories of his behaviour which, on their own, should be enough for someone to be considered a problem. This latest incident is just what it took to finally tip things over the edge.
This article then goes on to talk about people like Stallman being needed, or essential for something like free software. It doesn't matter, even if it was true, which there is no way of proving, it's pure assertion. Phrases like "required someone who couldn’t take a hint" might sound all perseverance and dedication to this writer, but perhaps going and asking women what comes to mind when they hear about people like this might be an eye opener.
Without him students wouldn't have as many free tools? Maybe, but maybe they would have other tools, better tools, built by the people his behaviour, and the behaviour of people like him, have driven from the industry before they got a chance to have the impact that people like him seem to assume is a right.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21113873
I might have to add a bunch of sources since we seem to have a lot of people in denial. The responses to the Medium article are... not nice.
RMS still refuses to take any sort of criticism, even now.
People refuse to see the problem in this very thread.
That is what's wrong with tech. Not wanting to see the problem.
walter lewin was at mit for 43 years before he was exposed and fired for sexual abuse.
This is a tough rhetorical device. I’ve read quite a bit about this recently. I am not a huge RMS reader and while I’ve known of him for 25 years or so, I haven’t nearly read everything he said and everything written by people who met him.
So maybe he does have a pattern of behavior that’s negative enough to be fired. But maybe he doesn’t have a pattern but some people incorrectly perceive a pattern. It’s tough without proper data to differentiate.
What I have read is a half dozen accounts of not really clearly defined “charges” like “he asked me out once” and “someone told me that women at MIT keep plants to wars him off” and “he made jokes about virgins.”
Granted, I don’t know the method for cancellation but even if everything I read on HN is true. If every story ends up being completely accurate in the most negative way possible, thats like 20 things over 40 years. And not a pattern unless implicitly add in much more.
I think that these anecdotes are useful if I’ve already decided RMS is a misogynist and I want to back in some evidence. But I feel like if this were given to a jury of his peers he would be acquitted
It also seems weird to me how these few stories are presented as evidence as if they count for a lot. That’s scary as I’m not sure how anyone can defend themselves against faulty evidence. Or even to determine if it’s faulty.
So we run the risk of going into a weird mob event where only negative evidence can be presented. There is no defender. There is no real judge.
This is not a healthy way to treat people. And I don’t think it’s a good way to produce good software.
I feel like if all this was handed to a judge or jury it wouldn’t meet the standard for civil verdicts either.
It’s only when I see this stuff presented in the tumbler verse world of most uptweets is true or whatever that it seems to stick.
It’s certainly currently effective, but I don’t know how sustainable it is because it seems like a poor way to produce quality things.
Perhaps there will be a critical mass of people who just adhere to a rational ideal and break the boycotts to the extent where we can have a parallel world that ignores such style of medium-post fueled discussion.
There is no particular charge to defend so it is indefensible. It is more insinuation than accusation. It also sounds vaguely convincing without needing to provide any actual evidence or cite any specific instance, and turns singular instances of not-really-a-problem into a 'pattern' (eg, like what happened to his door sign).
> But maybe he doesn’t have a pattern but some people incorrectly perceive a pattern.
I went to a Stallman talk on Free Software once when he was in Australia. The questions he fielded after the talk where honestly jawdropping and one of the first encounters I had with how little some people understand subtle arguments.
"Software must be free, but people can be paid to work on it!" then "So what you are saying is that people should work without getting paid?" style exchanges.
Stallman is defiantly no stranger to having his words misunderstood. It wasn't even malicious, people just didn't understand him.
They ware free to develop whatever they want. If they do not wish to be a part of the GNU project that is fine, make your own project and develop whatever you want.
If people out there were willing to put in the years to create better software than what the GNU project provides than they would have done so.
And a lot of great free software has been created outside of GNU.
It is like saying that unless you get commit rights to the Linux kernel, or if you didn't partake in Linux development you could not write software. Maybe Linus called you an idiot.
Your argument is that if Linux hadnt written the kernel we would have had a better operating system today.
Being a part of a project is not a right, it is a privilege. Writing free software is something anyone can do, and they can do it a lot better because of GNU/Linux. Just do it.
We do have some evidence as to how likely that is given that projects such as Mastodon, NodeJS, GIMP and others have been forked by groups claiming to be dissatisfied with the 'toxic' behavior around said projects. They have indeed produced elaborate code of conducts, but no computer code to speak of.
In September 2019, it was reported that Stallman had made statements on an internal CSAIL listserv in defense of deceased MIT professor Marvin Minsky, in relation to Virginia Giuffre's deposition that she was directed to have sex with Minsky by Jeffrey Epstein.[117][118] As a response, Stallman resigned from both MIT and the Free Software Foundation.[119][120][121]
"What this is really all about" is wildly subjective for such a circumstance (not a legal criminal context with judge/crime). This might be what it's "really about" to some, like the activists campaigning for this.
For the institutions making the decisions (MIT, FSF) I'm pretty sure this is "all about" scandal. One highly visible scandalous statement. A pattern of scandalous statements. Rumour os scandalous behavior. Most importantly, the promise of further scandal unless you disassociate from him.
I think RMS is one of those judgments that people would make differently in public and in private.
Let's say I found 10 times over two decades where you did something inappropriate (I think the average person would be a saint if this was the number of times they erred in two decades) and put them all into a single article. Would that mean you have a "pattern of behavior"? It would certainly present as one. Or merely that you are human and occasionally say or do dumb, inappropriate things? It seems at this case that all of the "pattern of behavior" was speech in this case, and not particularly egregious in any instance.
About what exactly? Are the "other people" also as humble in their opinions?
> This latest incident
There is no "incident", his comments are entirely fair if quoted properly.
> it's pure assertion
much like the the "stories of his behaviour"
> going and asking women what comes to mind when they hear about people like this
What a standard to aspire to - forget "presumption of innocence", the new standard is "what come to mind" for whatever bias floats from the unconscious at the time.
(There's also the meta-issue that rule-by-lying-journalists-and-misinformed-mob is terrifying and despicable, but it doesn't affect the object-level question of whether RMS significantly contributed and/or contributes towards making MIT and the free-software world unwelcoming to women.)
[0] https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...
[1] https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/1174433645110513664
[2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1174433645110513664.html
This is like how a dark basement might be scary to a child. A normal adult would explain that the basement is actually harmless, and teach the child to see it for what it really is and learn not be afraid of it. The feelings-first crowd would have us simply destroy all basements.
Feelings are important and can help point you in a direction, but they need to be tempered with reason and logic before resulting in action.
People who act solely on feelings are also easy to manipulate because talented writers, actors, etc can evoke strong feelings about anything regardless of facts.
I think this has arisen out of a feeling of righteousness as a result of having been morally right on many things in the past several decades, but it is just indulging the same human tenancy to hate others that perceived as not being part of one's tribe as racism etc, but with a better superficial justification. It is, IMHO, more unhelpful though. People can see racism is bad, but it is quite easy to fall into the trap of thinking that abusing a racist is perfectly fine, and go along with it, but there is a reason we don't use vigilante justice for everything. People become outraged at the treatment of people that they see as unfair, and, IMHO, this is where hatred of political correctness, and unwillingness to engage in attempts to be more progressive come from. IMHO, this hatred by the left, and with-hunt like behaviour, is at least as big an obstacle to progress on many social justice issues as people holding bigoted views that it seeks to break down, because it makes the bigoted people look reasonable.
At the beginning of this issue, I saw headlines or twitter comments alleging a lot of things, read what RMS had actually said, and concluded that the headlines and tweets are bullshit, and dismissed them all, resolving to never believe this type of thing without examining the evidence myself again. This would probably have led to me dismissing a lot of complaints about people in positions of power, assuming they they are similarly unreliable. A friend has said that there are other examples of RMS being disrespectful towards women, but I haven't had a chance to look at them yet, and are not prepared to believe them without evidence, because I have seen that much of what is said second-hand is complete crap. People exaggerating what he has said probably did so because they want to see action and create a safer space for victimised groups, especially women, in CS, but the effect has been to make all allegations highly suspect, at least to me, and I suspect many others, thus having the opposite effect. In a world where allegations that aren't true aren't extremely rare, no allegation can believed without a lot of evidence, and most crimes don't leave much.
The effect of these social media with-hunts that happen when anyone says anything objectionable has been to make most of the population highly resistant to condemning people I think, making it hard to do so when someone actually says something terrible. I think that a significant part of the reason that there is someone who advocated sexual assault as president of the US is that people have heard wolf-cries about people so much that they just don't care if they hear that someone has advocated sexual assault, because last time they heard that, the person had just said something mildly insensitive or something, and so they have started dismissing all allegations unless they have a lot more evidence behind them.
I think that people on the left going overboard in hating their opponents have created more problems for their side than their opponents. I say this as someone who is extremely left wing on most issues. Exaggerating things is never helpful I don't think.
I'm not saying that RMS has committed any crimes of course, but there are other reasons that people do not see him as a political figure that they can rally behind in the modern day. A lot of this is entirely about image. People feel uncomfortable having an aging, socially irrepressible person in charge of an organisation which they support. A (seemingly false) allegation is all that it took to bring those qualms to the fore.
Also I note that the author tacitly avoids the other comments which RMS has historically made, in particular with regards to abuse of minors, instead focusing on the one which was incorrectly taken out of context.
This was a final straw situation.
But when social media archaeologists revive past 'thought crimes' from 20+ years ago to use against anyone, it is ridiculous to completely silence and exclude them from society, especially someone like Stallman who is very principled in his cause.
You have to go with the flow. But still people expect from you to be a superstar of what you are doing.
Can we please stop removing Stallman discussions from the front page?
I understand we want to keep things civil on HN, but the reality is that this dramatically impacts this community and all developers - probably more than we realize on the surface. I Discussing it and essentially letting everyone voice their thoughts is a way to both (a) come to consensus and (b) potentially see view points.
As it stands the “media” has a voice, most developers come to Hacker News.
My understanding is that automatic removals (from flagging) get reviewed and unremoved if the admins don't see a good case for the submission being flag-worthy.
I'm finding these threads by googling "Hacker News Stallman" every couple of days.
Either I am vastly overestimating the quality of american top university education, or the first option is highly unlikely. So, who benefits from Stallman getting removed from the picture? Or, given that the original author was also from MIT, maybe it was just some sort of personal grievance?
It seems totally possible that some graduate mechanical engineer totally misread a text. Mechanical engineers aren't known for being social butterflys.
> visiting professor has a poor grasp of social context and an inability to synchronise with other people.
I am not that interested about the broader political context. I would like to know who (and why) shot Franz Ferdinand so to speak.
[1] https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/MIT-SAT-scores-GP... [2] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-ranki...
The most disgusting thing is that whose who witch-hunted him, from their higher moral ground, will face no consequences at all.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. At the very least, the FSF has lost some annual contributions...
Of course this is inevitable. When I was young, you just did what you did and tried to find other people who also did what you did. Maybe they liked you, maybe they didn't. If they didn't you found someone else or you made that group of people. It was all about freely associating.
The nerds got beaten but that was always going to happen when this thing became big.
When Terry Davis (of Losethos fame) said deeply offensive things that were personally offensive to me, we all tried to understand that it came from a troubled mind, that we could admire the work without tolerating the outbursts. With the socially awkward folks, it was even easier. We could gently direct while moderating their extremes.
Cancel culture is a mistake. I'm not bold enough to face it under my real name so I'm just going to weather it under the tarps where my people stand with their tenets like lit beacons barely visible in a storm. If you invoke Crocker's Rules, if you can forgive and redirect, and if you can disagree with words without invoking nuclear retribution, you can find the rest of us in our scattered micro-communities.
Good luck.
"Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism."
About the only lesson you can learn from this is that if you really cherish Freedom of Speech, then you actually require Fuck-you money to practice that right effectively.
This is really the crux of the matter. Richard Stallman should absolutely be held accountable for the stupid things that he has said. The problem is that humanity _really_ needs people like Richard Stallman- very few others have made such a practical (Emacs) and political impact on software, and by extension, the world as we know it. There aren't many Richard Stallmans, and if you get rid of all them then _really_ bad things will happen.
It is equally important that he is punished, that he repents, and that he continues his work.
I sometimes hear people say "if tech wasn't stereotyped as a bunch of nerds, there would be more women in it". This ignores the fact that there is a strong causal relationship between being perceived as a nerd and having a serious interested in software. It's like saying "if I didn't hold people who do software in contempt, then I might have done software!".
The feeling that you have to be super sensitive will close more doors then before - prove me wrong.
Because AFAIK he did not get as much backlash as RMS is getting at the moment, nor did he lose any position somewhere.
When at work it's very different from when I'm at home with my mates. Me and my coworkers have to share space, and so the dynamics are not the same. If one of my mates gets hurt by my jokes at his expense, he can just decide not meet me. At work, my coworkers don't really have a choice.
On a related note, the Mercedes F1 team just fired four employees, apparently for making a poll of when one of their coworkers would break his Ramadan fast. Maybe funny for a group of pals, but not fitting at the workplace.
https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/146280/mercedes-dismissed-...
The kind of people that grossly misinterpreted (and I use these words because my English isn't good enough to use stronger words while remaining polite) Stallman's comment about Minksy won't care about the situation or context.
At what point in your working life have you ever wanted to say "child sexual abuse is okay"? Is this really something you feel that you want to say but now can't?
Neither OP nor RMS said "child sexual abuse is okay" or wants to say that--you know that, right? Why are you phrasing it that way?
The only rational interpretation is that you're deliberately misrepresenting things, which is ironically one of the main thrusts of the linked article. The language used here is important, as are forums like this one.
> By satisfying the mob today, we are sacrificing our future. That’s the real risk.
Precisely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Red_Guards...
What is wrong with that, if indeed the accusations were inflated and inaccurate?
As far as I can see from this case, he is correct. He could have expressed himself better, but we're talking about RMS here.
Edit: as for the "maybe homeless" claim, as far as I know, it's his life style. Relatedly, I've heard many horror stories of people who hosted him. Here's one I saw recently (with more in the replies): https://mobile.twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/117398128703...
Honestly, I’d Remove the “flame war” system for the day. I feel Hacker News needs some discourse. The vocal minority is drowning out the masses.
1. He said/did thing x. He must lose his livelihood and be annihilated.
2. He did not say thing x, but he said y which is basically thing x.
3. He said neither x or y, but he essentially deserves this anyway because of other things he may have done or said. They may have not offended anyone at the time to cause this level of outrage, but clearly combined with what he may have said recently, his time was up anyway.
4. He may not have deserved what happened to him, but maybe he should have just kept his mouth shut about issue x. If me and my friends accused him, then he probably wasn't innocent.
(5.) Write medium/Quillette/twitter post: I was part of the mob until it came for me.
Physical industries require groups of people, so you don't usually see heroes emerge from them.
(BTW I agree with you that "without [hero], [advance] wouldn't have happened" is suspect.)
Let's hope that we can still play chess together.
No. No, he didn't. He made some technically incorrect comments. Regardless of whether or not what Minsky did should be considered assault, it is considered assault, and (more importantly) it was considered at the time Minsky is alleged to have done it.
Stallman did not say that what Minsky did shouldn't be assault. He said that Minsky shouldn't be regarded as having committed assault.
Instead, I’ll make a point that should concern anyone who actually cares about Free Software and not dragging it into the culture war: the article claims Free Software has a bus factor of one (or possibly zero now). That had better not be the case. And if it is the case, now is the time to do something about it.
I've seen this said a few times, and it needs to be cleared up.
Stallman defended Minsky by saying it wasn't rape and it was assault. To mount this defence Stallman had to ignore common English definitions for both words, and he had to ignore the legal definitions of both words.
People are angry at Stallman for what he actually said, not what you think they think he said.
If you want to say that you want necrophiles to fuck your corpse when you die; that you think the harms of incestual abuse can be avoided with condom use; that you think child abuse isn't that harmful; that you think sexual assault isn't assault unless force or violence is used; that having sex with a trafficked coerced child isn't rape; then you shouldn't be surprised when projects want to distance themselves from your views.
> You don’t get the free software movement without a person like Richard Stallman
We don't get the free software movement we have without Stallman, but what's that actually saying? How popular would gnu be if it had someone who was better at communication involved?
Not many people thinking about it in this way, kudos.
Also, how popular would gnu be if the US had a copyright reform, or if we lived in a fairy world with unicorns? There is no point to such questions: if there ever was a person who could be a worthy replacement of rms at the helm of FSF, they preferred to remain invisible. So the most plausible scenario is not "someone like rms but better", it's "nobody remotely as good at all".
I disagree on both accounts. Rape, to derive its moral severity, requires either intent or negligence. I realize there's a meme about "she told me she was 18" but that does fall under the negligence angle - the implication is "he should have known". (And Minksy did know, or at least suspected.) But drop into a situation where there was no way for them to know, and at least to my intuition the moral badness disappears.
I think there's just a level of ... the sexual event alone creates a certain mass of moral badness, and this mass has to go somewhere, so it's usually pinned on the older partner. However, I'm fully willing to pin it on Epstein in this case if it has to go anywhere. And if that isn't possible - well, maybe it can't be put anywhere. I think this is a social/moral difference; I come from a society where even the law acknowledges that sometimes there's morally bad events that have no guilty party at all. If a mentally disabled person rapes someone because they have no concept of consent, whose moral fault is it? Where do we put the blame? To me, it's obvious that we put it with the people and structures that were supposed to have prevented the event but failed to. If the event was provoked, we put it with the people who provoked it. In this case, that person is unambiguously Epstein, who was the source and cause of all the moral badness in play. This is not always possible, but conveniently in this case it is.
Here's what a proper newspaper wrote on the subject:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/17/mit-scient...
> "In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, mostly in defense of his late friend and colleague Marvin Minsky."
I think it's more to the point that people who, for whatever reasons, have a grudge against Professor Stallman (and there are undoubtedly a lot of those) are very happily jumping on the band waggon.
edit: some clarification
> People are angry at Stallman for what he actually said, not what you think they think he said.
This isn't the lie we're talking about, whatever else people are angry about, many are angry about:
"MIT Scientist Defends Marvin Minsky: Epstein Victim Likely ‘Presented Herself’ as ‘Entirely Willing’"
This headline implies Stallman was defending Epstein, not Minsky, and suggest he said the victim was "willing".
> and he had to ignore the legal definitions of both words
He didn't ignore them, he criticised their usage and how they are perceived by the public; Are you going to comment on the full context and motivation behind Stallmans' comment?
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 author missed the point of the Me Too movement. Lot of other powerful people were not publicly accused for decades because they were powerful and could easily silence their accusers.
this is certainly not the case for Stallman, as proven by the continuous stream of angry criticism that he has been receiving from many people through the years. It does not seem that RMS held any real power over anybody (except maybe for the handful of FSF employees). The fact that this criticism, which has already existed openly, has had a real effect on the FSF and MIT is obviously due to pressures from higher-ups, not from twitter pawns.
https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendi...
It also links to this, from 1983 which does not name RMS but is pretty interesting and damning about the culture of computer science at the time:
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~lazowska/mit/?source=post_p...
Disclaimer: I'm a man, I'm not a feminist, I dislike cancel culture.
At the top of the frontpage:
- Mesh Spreadsheet - 66 points, 2 hours ago
At the bottom of the frontpage:
- In Defense of Richard Stallman - 463 points, 1 hour ago
Archive: http://archive.fo/Mc5qV
Specifically, rules 1, 2, 4, 8.
and as esr wrote:
>I guess he was sleeping in his office and can’t anymore.
But this hasn't been true for years.
>Until around 1998, my office at MIT was also my residence. I was even registered to vote from there. Nowadays I have a separate residence in Cambridge not far from MIT. However, I am rarely there, since I am nearly always travelling out of town.
Done. You go on record that it’s sometimes ok to fuck children you’re gonna have a bad time. Full stop. Who gives a shit that the Minsky comment got misquoted or whatever, he has worse shit on his website. Why is this a conversation?
A friend of mine is fond of telling people who make such absolute, unquestioning claims that they would have made an excellent SS officer.
My point is that there are a bunch of people nitpicking that the Minsky remarks aren’t a tacit endorsement of pedophilia, and maybe they’re not. But RMS has a tacit endorsement of pedophilia on his website, so if that’s a bad enough thing to fire someone over then that ship sailed a long time ago.
If tacitly endorsing pedophilia is something MIT is cool with, that’s a different conversation. I very much doubt they’re cool with it, but I’m not affiliated with MIT, so you’d have to ask them.
And you are now backpedalling.
Stop with this crap, I'm sick of the emotional rhetoric and lies in everything.
I wish we were in a world where en employee saying something just isn't considered endorsement, tacit or otherwise, by the employer. Then we wouldn't be in this mess. And I can't help but notice that activists who want to punish certain views are the ones encouraging the interpretation of employees' speech as endorsement by the employer in order to be more effectively able to punish speech they don't like.
I'm sure they would be less happy if the shoe were on the other foot and authoritarian rightists were in charge, but they are not looking that far ahead apparently.
I literally cannot believe that words like “SS Officer” and “authoritarian rightists” are making an appearance in a conversation that started roughly with “nah he actually said that shit, here’s the link, and no one should be surprised that he’s having a terrible time as a result, the Minsky shit is not necessary to establish that he actually said that”.
I really cannot see why everyone is so fucking super duper hyper charged up over this. Pedophilia being bad is about as vanilla of a position that it’s possible to take on anything, and while free speech entitles people in the US at least to take a different position, it seems like kind of a stretch to expect anyone’s employer to line up behind that.
ycombinator seems to have an agenda in this too apparently.
Like no other decent person would've been able to invent these?
If someone appears to be having sex with someone that appears to be underage, the older person appears to be sexually assaulting the younger person. This is because a minor cannot legally consent which makes non-consensual sex forceful by definition, hence it is called assault.
In other words: rms was wrong, and now rms is gone.
Glad to see these updates.
It's a shame what a piss-poor narrow-minded society 'the west' has become...
"don't defend the rape of children" isn't narrow minded.
How far would Linus Torvald have made it in today's political climate?
Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American gives some great insights into the issue of feelings vs. truth.
You are underestimating, radically, the diversity of thought amongst humans. And particularly on the margins of leadership where the people who come up with new ideas are - obviously they aren't guided by social proof because they are working on new ideas. They have to be very experimental, and probably believe all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
If Stallman was the sort of person who only held mainstream views he would not be in the FSF. Which was a point addressed in this article.
I don't know which views in particular you are talking about, but many of them are much more mainstream than his critics are admitting to. Particularly the 17-or-18 comment; in Australia consent is age 16 so he had a point there.
And if they publicly talk about those weird views they may find themselves being asked to leave their organisation, especially if those views are that child sexual abuse isn't so bad.
> in Australia consent is age 16 so he had a point there.
Can you link to the Australian law that shows the age of consent for coerced prostitutes is 16?
> Can you link to the Australian law that shows the age of consent for coerced prostitutes is 16?
Here you go. http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/nsw/cons...
Obviously sexual slavery is illegal. Everyone agrees that that is a bad thing, and nobody I've heard of has ever tried to argue there is a nuance there.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Stallman/Archive_...
To go a bit philosophical: I wonder if we can truly be rigid in some aspects and flexible in others. I guess this can be taught.
> Last week, on a private MIT mailing list, Richard Stallman argued that a sex trafficking survivor may have "willingly" presented herself, and thus Minksey hadn't really committed sexual assault. That being coerced by Epstein made it not rape.
Which is flat out wrong, and something that the article here explicitly demonstrates why it's false. Did you read the "Defense of Richard Stallman" article presented here in this thread?
And that thread contains misleading or outright false information, so I am honestly not sure what of it is truth-worthy. Do you have secondary sources, or is this internet rumor all?
these remarks, while slightly distorted by the media, are still part of a pattern of dismissing sexual assault (including the way RMS insists on not using the word assault despite it being well understood that assault does not have to be physical violence)
rms is the sort of person who overshoots principled to a point everyone is tired of talking to them and where in-person criticism dies before it is even expressed because why bother with someone who will never seek to be better anyway and that afforded him a lot of leeway, even if i think the means of removing him now have been not entirely clean, it still was overdue
Genuine question: where is this documented? I have been using GNU stuff for 25 years and until now have never heard about this. Do you have links to reputable sources?
It seems to me that Stallman advertising that he likes cuddles is automatically considered creepy, beyond the pale, whereas if a properly woke community of appropriately diverse individuals did the same, it would be just considered part of that culture and accepted.
What's more, Stallman used to be part of what that community used to be. He is a hippie. I bet people not up to speed on him reading about this incident assume he's an alt-righter who voted for Trump, but he supports Bernie Sanders, says that Australians should vote for the Greens, and advocates for weird gender-neutral pronouns.
And he likes cuddles and dared to advertise that fact!
I acknowledge that putting that on a business card is out of line in today's culture, but god I wish it wasn't. If you are creeped out by an old man wanting cuddles, but you wouldn't if it were someone else, then you are a bigot. And if you're creeped out any people at all advertising that they like cuddles, then that is stifling and the future is going to be bland and full of lonely people.
Nobody is accusing RMS of committing sexual assault.
Edit: also, there are plenty of people accusing Stallman of sexual assault. But I'm happy to argue under the pretence that that isn't true.
>Are the hypothetical weird poly people ineligible to work for MIT because they openly advertise their enthusiasm for cuddle puddles?
If they do it in a professional context, I would say yes.
I can't believe this hasn't been asked yet - if the allegations are founded, why didn't MIT do anything as his employer? They have a statutory obligation to provide a safe workplace.
If that sounds hard to believe I can empathise, it took a personal anecdote for me to get and notice the spread of it too.
If you're wondering how one would be disincentivized, have a lot at how people react:
Oh wait, you're saying that no allegations were made to them? Did I read that right?
Stallman did nothing like that, he just made some comments everyone should avoid in today's new middle ages, yet he is treated like a criminal. He failed to realize there are snipers out there, possibly paid ones, waiting for the six lines that could make an argument for hanging him, and he gave them those six lines: that's his only fault.
The FOSS community will have to watch very closely who is going to benefit from his departure.
What about BSD?
Here is a good explanation of the difference...
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/Free-vs-Ope...
Developer freedom… I guess you could consider that quite elitist, if you think about it (freedom for the ‰ or ‱).
More to your point, I have seen a lot less outreach on software freedom from BSD than from rms.
If my understanding is correct, BSD only started becoming free software in 1989 with the release of Net/1, and even then large chunks of the codebase were not free software.
GNU, on the other hand, kicked off some years before, in 1983.
"The end justifies the means" makes it sound like he was a Nazi soldier.
Tell me what you mean by "the means".
However, the fact that he is homeless has nothing to do with the discussion. It just adds some "feeling" to the problem which should not be there. A MacArthur fellow (1990) is supposed to be able to manage his life (or get someone to do so).
That's something that can make normal people kill themseleves at the worst, or throw them into a pretty bad emotional turmoil with some very real effects on their life.
Intelligence has nothing to do with this.
Especially people who may not otherwise have known.
Silencing, censoring, the discussion only allows it to keep getting worse, instead of potentially less worse.
I have no power on HN, and thus, no ability to censor.
" You don’t get the free software movement without a person like Richard Stallman."
Well once Stallman pass away, it will be the apocalypsis for the free software movement
https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/1173731697159835648
I don’t think it’s subscribing to or endorsing cancel culture to ask for that. RMS being a rude, insensitive jerk is not because he’s an aspie (claiming such is rude to aspies who manage to not be assholes), but because he is a selfish and self-absorbed person.
https://twitter.com/rakyll/status/1174141125902229504
We deserve better leadership.
If you want to do a better job; go do it.
No, they were not "technically correct." Neither Stallman nor the author of this post are experts on sexual assault, and neither has the requisite knowledge to even judge whether the statements were technically correct or not. If people are too lazy to learn about an issue in some depth, they should just shut up and listen to the experts. And if they don't want to listen to the experts, they should at least study the issue in some depth. I'm sure neither Stallman nor the author of this post would be as forgiving towards equally clueless, equally stupid comments made about programming by people who have no clear idea of what it is.
Also, the problem with making those comments, correct or otherwise, wasn't one of tact. That the author and Stallman don't understand the actual, direct, real harm in an authority figure making such comments in a public workplace forum could be either due to innocent ignorance or willful ignorance, but it is ignorance. And if, in the case of Stallman, he continues to cause this harm after being warned, and doesn't wish to apologize, and this comes after decades of inappropriate workplace behavior, then a sane world would show him the door.
In any event, like a lawyer who doesn't know the law, the author doesn't address, nor seem to understand, the issue at the heart of the matter, and puts himself in the same position of ignorance as Stallman. And so the post isn't so much a defense as it is yet another diatribe on how weird, confusing and even unfair certain subjects can seem to people who don't understand them nor really wish to. Thank you, but we know that. Stallman, or anyone for that matter, deserves better than this Rudy Giuliani "defense."