If emacs can live through Stallman's descent into absurd un-asked-for pedophilliac defense positions, not limited to defense of Jeffrey Epstein himself, Vim can survive the simple passing of its creator.
Emacs the tool and Stallman the person are not nearly as coupled as your comment implies. Stallman created Emacs, yes, but the Emacs community drove him out of the FSF in 2019, pushed back hard when he tried to return in 2021, and has been actively distancing itself from him for years. The community's resilience despite Stallman is kind of the opposite of what you're trying to say - it's not like Emacs users were defending him in solidarity.
Tools transcend their creators - it is actually an interesting point and worth making. You just didn't have to push Stallman shit here.
I'm literally describing the resilience of the emacs community exactly as you described.
And the emacs community deserves the right to call him out to distance ourselves from them.
I didn't ask for these weirdos to come demanding to litigate every detail of every sick quote he's ever given.
but i will not stand down to karma bullying to cover up sex crimes of a person just because i like his software.
> Stallman deserves to be criticized for his own positions.
I fully agree. I'm just asking to try to decouple that from Emacs.
> because i like his software
Can we agree that Emacs is no longer "his software" and it stopped being that long ago? Governance and ownership have separated from authorship, right? The point is - when the scandals got out, we didn't circle the wagons. If the tool and the person were tightly coupled, you'd expect the community to defend him. We didn't. The separation was/is real, not just rhetorical.
Sure, yes, GNU/Emacs is still officially an FSF project, and the FSF is still Stallman's institutional creation, even if he's been sidelined. His philosophical fingerprints - GPL, copyleft, free software ideology as distinct from open source - are baked into the project's DNA in ways that aren't cosmetic. So there's a version of "his software" that's genuinely hard to dislodge. I'm not trying to argue that or erase his authorship, no.
But can we still find a way to deal with it differently? Say:
- Wagner was viciously antisemitic; the music is still the music
- Caravaggio was violent, possibly a murderer, yet painted some of the most incredible art pieces
- Heidegger was a Nazi sympathizer yet produced genuinely influential philosophy
People are complex creatures, sometimes we need to decouple the evaluation of the contribution from the evaluation of the person. I just want to avoid circles like: "using/praising Emacs is bad because Stallman is bad, therefore his creations are tainted".
I'm not defending Stallman or any of his behavior (good or bad), I'm defending something the community itself largely built, maintained, and steered. When people outside of the loop hear these things together, it hurts me personally - the conflation feels like a category error aimed at something I personally have a long relationship with.
The annoying thing about these whole thing is that you threw the Stallman material probably without even thinking about any of that. It's rhetorical ammunition, not a serious argument. You're not really engaging with what Emacs is to its users - just reaching for the most socially radioactive association available to win a point. And I'm now having to "defend" against an argument that was never made in good faith to begin with. Which is exhausting in a particular way - not because the argument is hard, but because you have to take it seriously even when it wasn't offered seriously.
a) Drew is the person who wrote the major "takedown" screed accusing RMS of being a pedo(-defender). b) Drew was subsequently outed for having a long history on the internet of consuming & sharing lolicon and saying that 14-year olds should be required by law to have IUDs installed.
Do you have a link for this? What I recall of that whole scenario was that Stallman said something fairly minor regarding Minsky, and the nuance of the words written were lost on the mob and he was accused of saying something worse than that.
I'm not aware of him providing any defense of Epstein himself.
MIT scientist Richard Stallman resigns in the wake of his Jeffrey Epstein remarks https://share.google/L9w5zAnDjbvnrWhex
What Stallman said is "the people who were trafficked, probably did not tell the people they were trafficked to, that they were being trafficked and were there unwillingly."
I don't see how saying that is a "defense of Jeffrey Epstein".
Through personal conversations in recent years, I’ve learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per1 psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
Children: Humans up to age 12 or 13 are children. After that, they become adolescents or teenagers. Let’s resist the practice of infantilizing teenagers, by not calling them “children”."
THESE ARE THE WORDS RICHARD STALLMAN POSTED ON HIS OWN WEBSITE WITHOUT BEING PROMPTED.
please defend this. i really really want to see you stoop this low.
EDIT: OKAY i'm being DOWNVOTED for bringing these words to light. officially y'all are now covering up for child sex criminals. Sickening.
It's just that you don't seem to realize that what you perennially appear to have understood, is not what anyone wrote.
Him posting that doesn't have anything to do with you telling lies about defending Epstein. Both are shitty.
Is it now appropriate for me to tell lies about you defending Epstein, because you did something shitty (falsely accusing others of defending Epstein)?
He is assigning the blame to Epstein's victims.
The scenario being described was that Epstein was ordering some of his victims, who were ostensibly employed as masseuses at his resort, to go and offer sex to specific people who were at an event taking place there.
You don't keep a sex trafficking operation going as long as he did if you don't coerce victims in that situation to play along with the story that they are masseuses and that the offer of sex is coming from them.
if you dont understand what that is saying, i can't help you.
You can't see the difference between "she presented herself to him as entirely willing" and "she was entirely willing"?
Stallman may be a dick, but at least he's precise with his speech - this means exactly what it says, and in no way means what you want it to mean.
"The trafficked person did not reveal they were being trafficked, because they were trapped on an island with their abuser and were afraid".
This is not blaming the victim, nor a defense of the abuser.
From Minsky's point of view a girl who was old enough to legally consent to sex offered to have sex with him. According to witnesses at the event he turned down the offer.
The statements that Stallman made about the nature of those crimes, were not what you claim they are.
When third parties are discussing the crime, "the person who committed the crime may not have known they were committing a crime" is a valid, reasonable thing for a person to say as part of a discussion.
Doing so is not a defense of the person who trafficked the child to be raped.
“We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing,” Stallman added. “Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.”
"Sex trafficker probably told the people he trafficked not to tell anyone that they were being trafficked. Trafficked people trapped on an island with their abuser may have done as they were told out of fear." Obviously.
I don't see how that statement is a defense of Epstein, or victim blaming.
But it didn't, so it isn't.