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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

Can we define what opinions are allowed to be held anymore? Just put up a list somewhere with all the opinions that should be banned from polite society and rightly get you fired, so everyone can understand what they are?

Just as an example, the author wrote this a while back (among similar sentiments): "Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man." lol so true

Personally I'm not a fan of people promoting negative stereotypes of an entire race/gender in this way, but I would not support calls for Wingo's firing/"cancellation" for expressing this opinion. If this sort of charity for differing opinions is no longer reciprocal though, I see no reason for it be offered by anyone. We can all just retreat to ideological silos.

https://twitter.com/andywingo/status/778290363635302400

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Seems like RMS's Achilles' heel is harassment towards women, over the years, even after being made aware of it politely by others.

In that light, these are classic reads on the topic (copy pasting another comment):

[1] Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists (Ellen Spertus, 1991)

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040

[2] How to Encourage Women in Linux (Val Henson, 2002)

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

[3] What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You (Kathryn S. McKinley, 2018)

https://www.sigarch.org/what-happens-to-us-does-not-happen-t...

[4] Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, 2001)

https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-P...

[5] The Elephant in the Valley (by Michele Madansky and Trae Vassallo, 2015)

https://www.elephantinthevalley.com/

Also the news of RMS coming back seems to have been hidden from even FSF members.

https://twitter.com/fsf/status/1374399897558917128

These were really good reads, especially the third. Thanks.

Patricia Torvalds uses Apple products.

just throwing this out there, but like, blatant sexism and racism might be those opinions? tolerating these and promoting people holding them isn't cool either.

> "Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man." lol so true

> blatant sexism and racism

There seems to be a lack of self-awareness here?

Only if you ignore the all-important "punch up/punch down" rules. Because in current racial orthodoxy whiteness is not a race but a privilege class of the racially unoppressed, disparaging remarks about white people always "punch up" and are therefore acceptable.

>Just put up a list somewhere with all the opinions that should be banned from polite society

You betcha, I'll get you started:

- Do not advocate for rape

I don’t see how you can claim that Stallman "advocate[d] for rape." Please read what he wrote carefully - he says that it’s not clear that Minsky had knowledge of or intent to commit a crime. You can argue that Minsky was associating with Epstein and should have known what was going on, and that Stallman is totally unwise in his responses here, but don’t accuse him of something that he has not done according to the evidence presented in this issue.

> I don’t see how you can claim that Stallman "advocate[d] for rape." Please read what he wrote carefully - he says that it’s not clear that Minsky had knowledge of or intent to commit a crime.

His pro-child-rape advocacy was separate from his Minsky-might-not-be-a-rapist advocacy (so you can't read the latter carefully to disprove the existence of the former), and he has since recanted it (not that that necessarily means people must disregard it; it wasn't some ancient error born out of youthful ignorance when he endorsed political advocacy for elimination of all age of consent laws).

Maybe not youthful ignorance, but ignorance just the same. RMS's stance was a libertarian "no harm, no crime"; he reversed it when he learned that there is inherent harm in sex between an adult and a child.

You may argue "That's common sense, he had no excuse", but RMS is... neurodiverse enough to have trouble with "common sense" in situations like this.

Anyway, his former views are oddly enough broadly consistent with those of the foundational philosophers behind gender theory and third wave feminism, including Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, both of whom believed that pedophiles constituted a socially oppressed sexual class much like gays. Which makes it unsurprising that "social justice" types tend to take glee in exposing and shaming alleged pedophiles (or pedophile sympathizers) from the other side, while closing ranks to defend pedophiles found within their own ranks.

> Maybe not youthful ignorance, but ignorance just the same. RMS's stance was a libertarian "no harm, no crime"; he reversed it when he learned that there is inherent harm in sex between an adult and a child.

Even taking that as absolutely true (which I think is quite suspect, circumstantially), it says something about the judgement and credibility of someone who has spent most of their life in public advocacy roles that they would start publicly arguing for legalization of sex with chidren as public policy not later than the age of 50 (the first public statement on the issue I can find is from 2003), and do so repeatedly over a period of over a decade and a half before “learning” that it his harmful to children (Stallman recanted on the issue in 2019).

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