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Comment by NoImmatureAdHom | Hacker News Reader

Agree with you that the discussion shouldn't be part of his job. But there should also be room for him to have a public discussion that isn't part of his job. I don't recall the details, were parts of this discussion on the fsf home page or something?

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Not FSF's site that I know of, but there's mentions of these "consensual pedo" stuff on his blog. As he's a visible spokesperson, that means his blog content is part of his overall role, and not something that can be treated in isolation.

I'd also push back on the post further up: It's not a particularly interesting philosophical question, and I don't think pure inquiry is RMS's goal here given his tendency to aggressively hit on women that are completely uninterested in him in contexts where such behavior is inappropriate.

"As he's a visible spokesperson, that means his blog content is part of his overall role, and not something that can be treated in isolation."

I agree this is de facto the case. It's kind of sad, though, and I don't think the world needs to be this way. There should be a way for an e.g. CEO or similar to have a life and persona outside of a job.

There are various ways to do that. Plenty of famous people manage to figure it out. That's not what RMS was after. He's putting this stuff up on his blog, which he uses for activism, not abstract philosophical inquiry.

...yeah, and activism should be an acceptable (albeit insufferable) part of one's non-work persona.

"How dare people have opinions on politics or society on their personal web blogs". How is this any different than telling celebrities to pipe down, as if people aren't human anymore once they become famous?

When you have the megaphone of fame in your hand, you can't pretend it doesn't exist. That kind of influence is an enormous privilege, one that nearly everyone that has it has had to chase aggressively their entire careers if not lives. You cannot pretend a celebrity pontificating into a camera that is broadcasting to 100's of millions of people is the same thing as someone's personal weblog that no one ever reads. You can't abstract or generalize to "principles" in that sense over this. Once you're famous you have to own that, or take yourself out of the spotlight. As I said in another comment, there are many famous people who've figured out how to self actualize their lives without attracting attention.

People also make the choice to cling onto famous peoples' words. They could just as well not do that.

> That kind of influence is an enormous privilege, one that nearly everyone that has it has had to chase aggressively their entire careers if not lives.

I don't think RMS did that, and I don't think "nearly everyone that has it has had to chase [it]". Some people do, and others just... become (in)famous in their respective fields. Imagine just wanting to be good at basketball, getting some of level of fame, and then just hearing "shut up and dribble", etc.

> there are many famous people who've figured out how to self actualize their lives without attracting attention

And how does one go about this without e.g. not saying anything at all? Discussing politics or societal ills is -always- going to irk some people. It's really not fair to say that, because someone now has some level of reach, that they have to basically say nothing at all. Why is there no personal responsibility or accountability? I'm going to assume the controversial stance here that people just don't raise children right, to not dwell on peoples' words just because they're "famous". And that is a larger societal issue than celebrities simply having opinions as a human being.

> People also make the choice to cling onto famous peoples' words. They could just as well not do that.

We cannot change the behavior of every person in the world.

But we can change the people who represent the FOSS community to the world.

> You cannot pretend a celebrity pontificating into a camera that is broadcasting to 100's of millions of people is the same thing as someone's personal weblog that no one ever reads.

I'd say it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference.

Who arises to that status is becoming more organic, which is probably a good thing in my book, but access to the top tiers of success/influence remains closely guarded by the people with the power to do so.

People can say whatever they want. If you don’t like someone’s specific critique, tell us why instead just saying it is bad to critique famous people.

Being a public figure has a lot of downsides. Maybe society could, as a whole, be a bit nicer to public figures (and everyone else for that matter). But that is a bigger ask. And it’s not exactly clear how to achieve that.

> There should be a way for an e.g. CEO or similar to have a life and persona outside of a job.

It's called private life for a reason: it's not in public.

But when acting as a public speaker and spokeperson you should be acting accordingly.

Weird remarks about age of consent on public mailing lists, or hitting on every young woman at a conference or eating skin from a foot in front of a whole audience are all behaviors that put the whole FOSS movement in a bad light.

Downvoting without commenting... interesting.

I'd love to see what contributions to FLOSS the downvoters have achieved.

His blog clearly states: "This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman. The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project. For the sake of separation, this site has always been hosted elsewhere and managed separately. "

That's far from enough.

No, they were on his personal site where he writes voluminous “political notes”.

The only reason that didn’t create more controversy before is that he is very left-wing politically and so are most power brokers in the industry. So being outspoken about the Iraq war, etc didn’t get him canceled in the same way as happened to the Dixie chicks. If he were a strident Republican I suspect his political notes would have put him in trouble far sooner.

One could certainly argue that as an ambassador for FLOSS he should have avoided all politics on his website, on the other hand i guess it was only the two (very bad) notes on statutory rape that were dredged up later, along with a variety of other material, to justify the campaign against him since the initial Epstein/Minsky related allegation fell apart so quickly.

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