On Recent Controversial Events
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I can understand his position, but this is part of the picture of a core problem in society today.
Its NOT that leaders aren't allowed to speak about controversial issues - its that they aren't allowed to advocate ONE side of an issue, while the other side is perfectly OK. You probably shouldn't say "diversity is important but not our only goal" as a CEO, but you CAN say "diversity is the best". That kind of large scale censorship only stifles dissent without changing the dissenters mind. Which is a state of affairs the far left happily accepts - "toxic people dont deserve a voice". Just pray you don't speak against mob or they'll cancel you. Better yet, just don't even think those unthinkable thoughts. Submit to the collective. All your opinions can be inferred from your tribe anyways. You don't really exist, only your tribe does.
Maybe it doesn't matter too much if nobody knows who you are, but it's why some authors write under pen names. (Back when the U.S. was founded, writing for newspapers using your real name was apparently pretty rare.)
But it's true that it's going to be a lot easier to remain anonymous when your opponents don't have the resources of a government.
Against what baseline? The results are only discriminatory against a baseline in which affirmative action is baked in. But this can't be the proper baseline, because if it is then any amount of affirmative action can be called into question.
Does your company practice some affirmative action? That has a disparate impact that hurts minorities, because you could be doing more affirmative action!
Edit: simplified my original reply
Since the onus is on the employer to prove that they had a legitimate reason for this disparate impact, often these cases end in settlement.
I'm sure many of these cases end in settlement — 90% of all cases do. And yeah, it's not a great idea to go around saying stuff that will inflame people. But saying something that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said ("The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race") would not be great ammunition for a plaintiff.
> Just pray you don't speak against mob or they'll cancel you.
I think the prudent strategy is to understand what's being cancelled today and make sure you're on the right side of it. It's really pretty easy to do just by reading HN.
Just know that you're always speaking to the mob and you won't get canceled. If you have views that disgust the mob, you're going to end up like RMS.
A lot of people are upset about cancel culture, but if you embrace it, it's pretty easy to exploit. You don't have to do the canceling yourself, but if you understand it, it's like a cheat sheet for being socially "right" on every hot button issue. I can fit in any liberal circle with ease because it's so predictable, and I know how to be edgy if I want. And because there's only two tribes that are pretty much opposite, I can do the same with conservatives.
You can still have all the radical opinions you want, you just can't do public stuff with them under your real identity, if you want to avoid being canceled. Maybe we'll see a resurgence of anonymous early-internet type culture, where people have aliases and keep their views disconnected from their public life. I think that works pretty well, because most activism can be done anonymously. It's not that hard to conform irl and do meaningful things under an alias online.
Reading through those posts, is there any group in America that wouldn’t be angered by at least one of those posts?
The thing I feel bad about with RMS is that he's clearly not able to read the room, which used to be considered quirky at best and unpleasant at worst, but now he finds himself unable to function at all in a society that he doesn't understand.
Most of the stuff he's saying would have been fringe in the 90s, but now it's unacceptable and worthy of exile.
His comments are the wrong comments to defend, I think, for reasons adequately explained in the article. Minimizing the harm powerful people have caused to their victims is not "dissent" we should avoid stifling.
What exact comments? His comments on Minsky controversy are totally just.
Imagine you're in court, say you've been charged with something extremely serious and you're completely innocent. Your lawyer decides to argue your case by referring bitterly to a different, utterly hopeless case that he's losing. You wouldn't cheer him on for exercising his right to free speech -- you'd fire him and get an attorney that knew how to focus attention on a persuasive argument.
My point is eloquently summarized by someone else here:
"I guess free speech still exists in non-controversial matters, and for people who don't have to worry about employment."
How can defenders of "free speech" say that it's ok for them to say whatever they want, but it's unfair for other people to respond to them? This is a tactic especially favored by the alt-right. They claim they're being censored and appeal to "free speech" the instant someone calls out poor behavior, and then turn around and organize massive harassment campaigns against people who say things they don't like.
The position is logically inconsistent, but they've found that just saying "free speech" makes people want to defend both of their actions. It's a wonderful exploit targeting people who have been ingrained to enthusiastically defend people saying "free speech", regardless of whether or not what they're actually doing resembles respecting the rights of as many people as possible to speak.
I'd like to point out one more thing. This isn't censorship. This is what the real free market of ideas looks like. You say things that people find vile, and the market judges your ideas to be harmful and best avoided. That's how it's supposed to work.
It took about five years for the cultural zeitgeist of Germany to swing from extremely liberal to extremely fascist starting in the late 1920s. Sure, false flag and other political shenanigans hastened the process along - but it was the culture, or in your words, "the market", that managed to move rapidly to the right quite alright on its own.
Imagine if the nascent nationalist tendencies in the US and Europe really start ratcheting upward in a serious way over the next decade. Imagine that, at some point, "the market" judges pro-healthcare or pro-LGBT ideas to be harmful and best avoided. What then?
My point is that what you've done with your argument is handed Nazis all the moral authority they need to repress your ideas if their ideas become popular.
The argument for free speech is that we pay the small price of hearing vile ideas as insurance premiums against good ideas being censored if the pendulum ever swings the other way.
It isn’t limiting free speech by not wanting to listen to or follow people whose speech you disagree with and the argument that doing so is equivalent to how Nazis came to power is entirely historically inaccurate.
You're implying that the group of people - the subset of the German population - who were (allegedly) extremely liberal transformed into the group of people that were extremely fascist.
I don't have the time to research this, but it seems much more likely that these were largely - if not entirely - different population subsets, and that the latter arose in reaction to the former. It's not like the two groups had the same shared values with the new addition of "kill everybody that disagrees with me."
> The question is whether an organization should have a designated leader who is on a sustained, public campaign advocating about an unrelated issue that many consider controversial. It really doesn't matter what your view about the controversial issue is; a leader who refuses to stop talking loudly about unrelated issues eventually creates an untenable distraction from the radical activism you're actively trying to advance.
The inability to differentiate between "acute" and "chronic" plagues our day.
If you're gonna go with that line, stay on-message.
EDIT: What I mean is, it's entirely possible that its not just that Stallman had views that were disagreeable, nor that Stallman wouldn't stop talking about his personal views- its that Stallman wouldn't stop talking about his specifically disagreeable personal viewpoints.
I hadn't seen RMS's politics link before -- he puts out like 10 bullet-point hot takes a day, lots of them with a viewpoint way outside the mainstream. He's got weirdo semanticist takes about basically everything, including, as infamously linked, sex laws.
I normally want to defend the right to have unorthodox takes on general principle, but I can see where they're coming from here as far as leadership.
That is not invalidated by the fact that Kuhn also disagreed with the views RMS has expressed and Kuhn clearly wished to distance himself from those views.
I really respect this. Kuhn is articulating a principle here and then gives an example of how he himself makes a sacrifice to adhere to this principle. This makes him much more credible to me than if he was using the principle solely as an instrument against others.
But god forbid some computer programmer says something Americans don't agree with.
Depends on the things.
Remain President and play golf? Sure.
Remain a spokesman for free software and repeatedly and publicly expound on your belief that pedophilia isn't harmful, and that children are capable of sexual consent? Yes, apparently.
That, and then toss a match on the PR tinderbox that is MIT's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein with a tediously legalistic argument over the definition of sexual assault which appears to the rest of the world to be an attempt to defend Marvin Minsky's alleged involvement in child sex trafficking? No. Turns out that's the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Some leaders have tons of credibility capital banked away, so they can afford to freelance on the side. But freelancing is a luxury. Spend too much on that and you’ll fail at your main job.
Musing out loud here, the question is if an organization elevates its founder. It almost seems like it's the other way around - the founder elevates the organization. If we prevent people from founding organizations at all, will the organizations be founded by people with more acceptable views? Or not founded at all?
I understand and I fully stand by his belief that software freedom does not mean egalitarian and morally righteous principles have to be undermined in order to progress.
However, it is not the FSF's job to make sure those values are upheld in every facet of moral righteousness. The goal is clear: make and keep software free as in liberty. That's it. Anything else should be completely within the realm of personal viewpoints.
I completely and wholeheartedly stand by the fact that we as a society need to deal with sexual violence much better than we are currently doing so.
Not an ounce of my being, however, places the burden on dealing with this onto Stallman's, or Kuhn's, or any other FSF member's shoulder. Help if you can. Help if you want, but if your job is to make software free, you're doing great. If you can solve other moral issues while doing so, even better, but it's not required.
That's why I find it hard to believe that his behavior was so harmful to the organization.
Which is what this is generally all about: politeness. Not making people uncomfortable. Making them feel welcome.
I don't understand this. Are people in prominent positions not allowed to have opinions or interests outside of their job? As long as RMS wasn't actively using his power/influence as head of the FSF to advance his odd-ball views I really don't see what the problem is. The only argument I could see is that RMS's persona was so fundamentally quintessential to the FSF that the two could not be separated -- in which case firing him was obviously a boneheaded move.
There are absolutely jobs in the world where “don’t be a distraction” is a requirement for the job.
I can understand "don't be a jerk", and maybe RMS failed that test. But "don't be a distraction" can easily be (and has been) an excuse to oppress in the name of pragmatism.
That is basically correct.
If your job involves being a public speaker, who is 'on' 24/7, then that's what you have to deal with. You're always free to pursue flipping burgers, or fixing cars, where you only need to be focused on work for 40 hours a week.
Remember this wonderful bout of collective insanity: https://reason.com/2017/04/18/drupal-developer-ousted-over-k...
edited phrasing
Let me reverse that, if Stallman weren't heading up the FSF, would anyone give one iota of damn about his other oddball views?
Of course not. They would dismiss him as a nobody.
They can always share opinions anonymously. I don't know you who are: for all I know you could be the president of the US.
If you're seen as a figurehead of a company/organisation/movement etc, it makes sense to limit what opinions you say under your real name. As the article says, it can be a distraction from the organisation's purpose. Musk is a good example: I work in a company that has links to SpaceX, and when Musk dives off the deep end on Twitter every conversation about SpaceX eventually leads to a discussion about him.
People in prominent positions have visibility and platform that elevates their voice as well as tacitly tieing their declared opinions to the organizations they represent. That is just how societies operate. You can rationalize that it shouldn't be like that, but it always has been and always will be and it is surprising that people are seemingly shocked or offended by this.
Ouch!
Not everybody needs to be Dr. Ruth, but in some sense, Stallman going on about sex topics when he's not is as much a problem as Sagan once going on about the "reptile brain" without considering how much of the neuroscience he was contemporary to had already disproved that hypothesis.
If you're going to have strong opinions on something and want to maintain your credibility in general, at least find a trustworthy and informed advisor on the topic.
It's not a question of sexology, it's a question of ethics. I doubt that any of his critics are professors of sexology as well, people are arguing on moral ground here.
Many of issues people are attacking him on, are not issues in my country. I don't see many fellow Europeans bothering what he said, it's American moral issue totally.
I think I’m more on the side of thinking leaders should be moral people and not think that pedophilia is defensible. I do believe people in power should be held accountable.
I think “cancel culture” is the wrong term to use, I think is accountable culture. If you think it’s okay to demean woman and defend someone exploiting young girls because his sex trafficker friend gives his institution lots of money, then I think you’re a bad person.
Free speech doesn’t mean you’re free from consequences.
I don't know much about the author, but I really like this viewpoint. People are of course entitled to their opinions and to free speech. But we don't have to follow leaders whose values don't align with our own.
So this practically means the moment you become the leader, you renounce your freedom of free speech. RMS is a freedom fighter, there is no way he would agree to that. And I'm grateful he didn't give up.
Each word is a linked to a comment, some of them fairly eye opening.
His worst comment was probably this one https://web.archive.org/web/20180131020215/https://stallman....
Even were he to turn out to be an incredible coder and lover of open source, I also wouldn't expect the FSF to hire David Duke as a spokesman because the combination of two unrelated advocacy positions would be a distraction for both.
He hasn't been silenced. He still has internet access and the many publishing platforms that affords him.
He's been dissociated from a role in an organization.
If his ideas so clearly stand on their own, then he should have no problems. What he will not be doing anymore is acting as a direct representative of the organization.
He's being branded as an insensitive twit who's pattern of behavior has showed no signs of attempts to change, understand or really engage with the criticism he chooses to attract, and has finally broken the camel's back and this is the result.
Edit: have you ever witnessed something where all you could think while watching it was "Guy, just shut up, you're doing nothing but hurting yourself by talking."? Now imagine that instead of being some guy on news coverage it's someone who's seen as the public face of your organization, he has a history of doing the same thing and you have zero faith that he won't do it in the future.
I wouldn't personally touch any of these topics. Too controversial, no gain. But I can't really fault his logic. Of course, social and sexual morality runs on feelings rather than logic, and perhaps that's what RMS doesn't get!
He's absolutely free to speak his mind. Similarly, people and organizations are free to disassociate with him if they find his opinions offensive (or even just distracting).
The question isn't whether people should have the freedom to disassociate. I haven't seen anyone argue otherwise. The question is whether it's wise or beneficial to use that freedom in this way.
I only argued about freedom of association to counter that simplistic thinking. That is, yes it's your right to say whatever you want, but it's my right to disassociate from you if I don't like what you're saying.
> The question is whether it's wise or beneficial to use that freedom in this way
I agree whole-heartedly with this more nuanced take on it. In a round-about way, that was kind of my point - That the matter is not as simple as being able to say whatever you want, whenever you want, and not have repercussions.
If a person has responsibilities as a representative, then there isn't a clear cut separation between their private conduct and that representation, and they have to be aware of that and accept it, however reluctantly that may be. Anything that leader says and does may be interpreted by the public, rightly or wrongly, as being part of the representation.
He doesn't have to be.
Of course, equally, they don't need to at all be concerned with his thoughts or feelings when exercising their rights, either.
Now, if he wants them to give favorable consideration to him when exercising their freedoms, well...
Yes.
> That's not the same thing as using your words
It's an exercise of property and association rights, rather than speech rights, so, sure, it's a different thing on a precise enough level.
On the other hand, it's the same thing on the level of exercise of rights in which others thoughts and feelings need not be considered outside of voluntary (e.g., contractual) commitments or legal mandates.
Dr. Stallman is free to exercise his rights in manners which disregard the thoughts and feelings of others. He should not, however, be surprised that his doing so is reciprocated.
1. Dealing with a controversial issue from inside an organization rarely works. Sure, maybe FSF has been grappling with Stallman's non-FSF stances and how they hurt the FSF and free software in general. But they had several years internally to make changes and nothing happened until it spilled over into the public. And then, yes, it did happen quickly.
2. There is a huge tension between the mission of a group and how to interact with the society that group is embedded within. I agree that a group should focus on its mission, and leave other goals to groups more dedicated to those issues. I especially agree that a group with no particular expertise in a matter should avoid pontificating or trying to "lead" in that issue. And yet a group is composed of members from the society. There's a conflict here that no one really knows how to handle.
Why do people high up in very visible or very powerful organizations take on topics outside their remit? Because they have personal opinions and want to use the power of the organization to amplify their voice. I think this is a subtle form of corruption, even in the case where you "created" the organization. Because while Stallman did pioneer the idea of "free software", he's not personally responsible for all or even most of the success and visibility of the FSF. He hijacked the org to press certain opinions. And, yes, while he didn't pretend that the FSF was saying these things, he knew full well that he only had attention paid to him because of all the history of free software and the fact that he was the very visible figurehead. Saying these things to your friends and associates is one thing, but blogging about them is a public campaign.
I don't know the full answer. But an org can't avoid big issues for the society it's embedded in, because that often looks like it's made a decision (usually for repression - to wit, the many groups facing public approbation over apparent kow-towing to the Chinese position on recent events in Hong Kong). But also #metoo and LGBTQ+ rights and Epstein and any number of culture flashpoints in recent history. I think orgs need to make cautious statements that these things exist and that orgs will not endorse unethical or illegal behavior but that other things are up to the actual actors involved. So for example "Black Lives Matter" - I don't expect companies to be champions, and I certainly don't expect any companies to attack it (whether flat-out or noxious things like "Blue Lives Matter"); but I do expect those companies to not make empty talk about equal rights and diversity but to work to make sure their companies aren't part of the problem (e.g. only hiring white men, for example). When a problem is exposed to you, you take that information in and you use it, you don't ignore it, and you certainly don't work to undermine it.
These things blow up because someone in a position of a lot of power does something either purposely or accidentally evil, and then the reaction looks like an overreaction, and we all "murmur murmur MURMUR MURMUR!!" about it for a while.
Let's all be humans. That means we have our goals (game companies make games - and profits) but we also are composed of members of the society we are embedded in, so we are part of those larger goals whether we like it or not. And we don't make social decisions based on "the market", but on foundations of morals and ethics - which we argue about constantly, but over the longer run are pretty easy to see.
Not quite on a tangent - companies today face a huge problem in that they employ people, and people have their own opinions and goals not related to the company's mission. For some companies, the expectation is that you take no position on matters, because that would harm the opinion of the company. I think this is very problematic, especially since a lot of self-censoring happens. I said very little controversial in public while I was employed by a certain large game company, for example, and no one in the company explictly told me to be like that. I think that caused society a tiny bit of harm. But the flip-side is also bad in that companies face unwarranted criticism because some employee says something that goes viral, and then if the company fires the person, the company is in trouble, but if the company defends the person, the company can also get in trouble.
I think this whole thing is only tough because we haven't yet figured out how to handle it. And then once we do, future generations will look back in dismay and say "what the fuck, how could you have been so blind?". I wish someone would figure it out already, so we can go back to being productive.
I hesitate to bring up Trump in this context but I know many wish they didn't have to follow a man who casually joked about sexual assault. Yet Americans do have to follow Trump on matters of law related to his office as President, like it or not.
> [...] organizations need not and should not elevate spokespeople and leaders who speak regularly on unrelated issues that organizations find do not advance their mission, and/or that alienate important constituents.
I agree on "need not" but disagree on "should not".
Just because Kuhn chooses to keep his public persona free from conflicts with his personal commitments to organizations does not mean anyone else must as well. Nor does his belief that he is doing something worthwhile mean it is a universal moral law. I appreciate his integrity but I do not consider it a requirement for leadership of software advocacy organizations.
I find it troubling that a common tactic when someone disagrees with someone else is they want to ruin them. They want them de-platformed and unemployable. It isn't enough to combat their ideas with better ideas, they need them to go away permanently. I would have preferred both Kuhn and RMS to stay on the FSF and engage in a public healthy debate.
The Trump administration has, similarly, repeatedly fired public relations representatives when it became dissatisfied with their performance.
It's unfortunate that RMS loyalists will continue to control the FSF for the foreseeable future. This is one of those cases where progress is made one funeral at a time.
[1] https://maffulli.net/2019/10/17/why-richard-stallman-doesnt-...
I generally agree and I think the problem is bigger than SaaS. Consumers are now becoming accustomed to software "running" on low power hardware that simply cannot actually run on that low power hardware, which requires some sort of "SaaS" system, which in turn requires that they either trust somebody else (inevitably a for-profit corporation who very often has incentives misaligned with the user) or become their own system administrator (an unreasonable ask for the typical user.)
A concrete example:
Suppose a user wants a FOSS photograph organization application that supports organizing large numbers of images through tagging. A user coming from the proprietary world might reasonably expect this application to perform face detection and recognition to automatically tag all of their friends in the application. There are FOSS implementations of this kind of ML tech.. but what are the chances any of that heavy duty stuff can run on the users low power smartphone? Snowball's chance in hell. Even if you get it to run, it certainly won't scale as well as the SaaS alternative from Facebook/Google/Apple.
What's the answer though? I don't have a great answer to this, RMS obviously doesn't, I don't think any RMS supporters or critics do. Not that I've heard anyway.
And as you say, training these models is a different matter than merely using them. The data and power requirements involved are a huge problem.
(EDIT: AGPL Ghostscript is an ad for Artifex, but it's a very useful one.)
This is understood as the principle of freedom of speech.
We don't get that if you risk losing your job if you don't share every view of the majority.
The principle should be well understood by an organization that stands for, above all, these sorts of freedoms.
There is no freedom of speech left if you're only able to say what everyone agrees with.
When did we lose sight of this?
This posturing is shameful.
What I do see, is others utilizing their right to (dis)associate with whomever they want.
Freedom of speech has never included any notion of "Freedom from societal repercussions".
It's also important that the principle be applied in private interactions, weighing other considerations. Of course, a political diatribe at a funeral is a poor choice. But there need to be places for well intentioned and civil people to come together and discuss things, even if ignorance is spouted of from time to time. If we're all humble, we'll all understand we're each ignorant in our own way and have a little grace to let each other be wrong, annoying, and even circumstantially negative from time to time.
Yes, freedom of association is important and conflicts with freedom of speech sometimes. But deciding to shun people also has repercussions. We have to consider all the repercussions of all of our actions.
The question I would ask next though, is whether RMS is well intentioned, humble and aware of his own capability to be ignorant? I don't have a strong opinion, but there does appear to be a long history of behaviours and musings which suggest he isn't.
I'm not saying he deserves to be a social pariah. But it seems reasonable for the FSF to want to disassociate with him.