About the RMS Cancellation
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Video is probably NSFW and LOUD: https://f0ck.me/b/c7aceabf.webm
JS contains the following comment:
// much of the tech community is the kind of person that spent time infront of the computer instead of learning social competence.
// not all of you are arrogant pricks, but the soup is poisoned now.
What a ignorant attempt at a rebuttal. The letter substantiates aren't characterizing RMS as such without substantiation: they link in the letter to what they believe is behavior that displays these characterizations.
Why do you think this is going to happen soon after 2021 and not any other time since homo sapiens developed language?
Obviously many things are different now, so your statement isn't a-priori implausible. But I guess I'm not feeling an overall societal trend towards accepting more nuance.
It'll pass in a year or two, when they've come up with a new thing to admit to. (In this domain, every accusation is a confession.)
To address your point - from an tech-outside view, there is definitely something like "Cancel-Culture", but its difficult to realize if you don't have an alternative perspective on handling conflicts.
I believe this is just called the market. Market participants voluntarily defunding operations that are perceived as harmful is as old as man. Its just that we now have information to track funding sources at our finger tips. Boomers would've 'cancelled' IBM if they knew about the active contracts with the Nazi government during WW2, it wasn't some "unique lost wisdom" that stopped them, just a lack of information.
This is the market acting on more information...and the market was never expected to be efficient, especially in the short-term.
How about addressing the substance of the complaint?
That's not the point. The point of this cancellation is the exercise of power; it makes those who are perpetrating this action feel powerful, and closes the loop of a feedback cycle of justification.
Intentions and facts do not matter, because ultimately in this new era there is no path to redemption, no mechanism by which an apology can be accepted. The point is not consistency or actually building a safer or better world - if it were, RMS would rightly be considered a saintly figure for his contributions to the world. The creation and popularization of Free Software is a higher moral act than anything any social-justice keyboard warrior will ever accomplish, no matter how many luminaries they take down.
No, the point is to exercise power, to show any straight white (or white-presenting) male that they are vulnerable, and to ensure that more and more of us hide our heads lest we be the tall blade of grass that gets the scythe. This is, of course, our new privilege.
If you want to be horrid, you could call it a branding problem. There is a reason no ford in current production is called Edsel, despite Edsel Ford being a nicer person than his father.
I'm pretty sure the mechanism is: backing down from your position of power, apologising, being quiet in the community, and finally reintegrating once you've shown that you've learned from your past mistakes. Prison is (ideally) a non-voluntary version of this, and many countries rely on prisons to rehabilitate people.
On a smaller scale, I've seen this happen in friend groups: friend does bad thing, everyone tells them they've done a bad thing and that they need to absorb that, friend disappears for a year or two, keeping in touch with some of the group, and when they return they have the people they stayed in touch with to vouch for their personal improvement. There's plenty of movies where this happens to the protagonist near the end (although usually the format mandates that their transformation takes less than a year).
> [...] RMS would rightly be considered a saintly figure for his contributions to the world.
Good people can do bad things; the best people improve from them (see the above movie-protagonist analogy). Returning someone to a position of power without adequate evidence that they've changed their ways means that they have no personal incentive to put in the effort and improve themselves - they can return to the status-quo, which means the people that were disadvantaged before remain so.
> No, the point is to exercise power, to show any straight white (or white-presenting) male that they are vulnerable, [...]
People do use power when they attempt to de-platform someone, but I don't think that it's being used here for the sake of it. This person has done some crummy things, and refusing him his position should be a wake-up call to him that he has misused the power he was trusted with (this is the "everyone tell them they've done a bad thing" step in the friend-group analogy). It would also prevent this person from misusing the position's power further.
Making people feel vulnerable might sound bad at first, but the alternative is that some people are invulnerable, which (to me) is a terrifying prospect. Being able to do anything with no social consequences would allow people to serially commit to doing horrible things, without ever losing their ability to continue doing them.
> [...] and to ensure that more and more of us hide our heads lest we be the tall blade of grass that gets the scythe.
I'm not totally sure how this metaphor works, with respect to what the length of a grass blade represents. If it represents how poorly the person treats women then the metaphor works, but doesn't really seem to support your rhetoric.
This requires that you actually accept that your punishment is deserved; which implies giving into the Woke Mob. Not all of us are interested in doing that. Not all of us care so much about "disadvantaged" people, especially in the area of open source which has been as close to a true meritocracy as the species has ever created.
> This person has done some crummy things
RMS is clearly autistic, so whatever "crummy things" he's done need to be taken with a grain of salt. Maybe a boulder of it. I don't care what RMS thinks of women, honestly; I care what he thinks about code and computers and freedom. Why would you look to him for an example of how to treat or think about women? It would be like looking to him for how to think about the NFL or about the coronavirus or something: totally outside of his wheelhouse and ultimately not that important to what he contributes to and works on.
> Being able to do anything with no social consequences would allow people to serially commit to doing horrible things, without ever losing their ability to continue doing them.
The problem is that the Woke Mob has co-opted the control of the definition of what is horrible, and expands it continually over time into areas that were not always considered horrible; and what's more, they apply it retroactively. Giving those assholes access to controlling what happens in computing is not exactly a win for the species.
>I don't care what RMS thinks of women, honestly; I care what he thinks about code and computers and freedom.
God, I love it when the mask comes off completely.
I think RMS is a net good in the world. 99% of everything he's ever said and done has been some weird superposition of cringe and prophetic. The entire world owes him a debt of gratitude, but instead he's being slow boiled like so many other folks. I find it disgusting, and cowardly.
Go on ahead and pretend "equity" is somehow progress for as long as you want; eventually, when you're living in a failed state along the lines of South Africa, you'll understand.
It's just refreshing to see the sociopaths come out to display plumage from time to time, without the usual pretense or prevarication.
At least in the case of RMS he's still a net good for the species, in a utilitarian sense, even with what we know of his misdeeds. I won't defend them, rather, the way I look at it is that there was undoubtedly going to be someone of their ilk harassing women, and at least this one has also done something meaningful to go with it. At this point of civilizational decay, I will take what I can get.
Pretty much anyone I knew, said "never again" after hosting him. it was over 30 years ago now, and I can't recall names so please, don't do a <citation required> on me.