Can someone fill me in on the RMS drama/politics? Is this because he was cancelled due to (supposedly) defending Epstein and he's now trying to uncancel himself?
The FSF sadly functions as a cult of personality for RMS at this point. I do not believe either of them are doing anything to help the cause of FOSS at this point.
It's significantly more detailed and complex than "allegedly defending Epstein".
Here's the letter supporting RMS: https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
Now I know how it happens. Some people do something strange, then their number increases, they are very vocal, they're 100% sure what they do is right, they're very emotional about it, and at a certain point it seems like they are the majority. They do certain things like revolutions, usually with a bad result, and you can't do anything, you can just watch it powerlessly and hope it doesn't end badly this time.
If RMS accepts his cancellation, he basically caves to wrongful accusations. If he stays, we can't move forward and get work done because of the drama and all the viable reasons why he shouldn't be a central, public FSF spokesperson anymore.
Plus, everyone really just wants to see the FSF fail anyway, for some reason.
Being "intolerant to intolerance" is a fairly well accepted idea in societies that value personal freedoms.
He'd also have been disgusted by being used in a propagandistic manner.
It still looks to me that in this case, it's the people calling RMS intolerant that are the intolerant ones. On the contrary, I think RMS actually tolerates a whole lot. He clearly has different views than others on a variety of topics, yet he doesn't let it affect his technical decisions. He's been attacked viciously in the media, but he's tolerated it and is coming back to the FSF. An intolerant person would disappear. Consider all the people on the board of the FSF with opposite political views than his, that he tolerates on a day-to-day basis. An "intolerant homophobe/transphobe" would not tolerate having homosexuals/transexuals on the board, for instance.
Yes. RMS argued for gender-neutral pronouns since more than twenty years ago. Just because it is a different set of neutral pronouns than is popular today, some people mark him transphobic. That is absurd.
Unfortunately, the more tolerant attitude of just agreeing to disagree seems to have gone out of fashion. Now the preferred option is to destroy a person's entire career and slander their reputation with deliberate misinterpretations of what they've said and done.