What Efforts to Cancel Richard Stallman Ought to Teach Us About the Media | Hacker News Reader

What Efforts to Cancel Richard Stallman Ought to Teach Us About the Media

techrights.org

24 pointsamcclure11 comments

I’m not going to go sleuthing into the links and beyond (the one I clicked was for the Stallman Support website which presumably is biased), but I’m somewhat aware of the controversies around Stallman. Can someone with more knowledge weigh in on what the post says?

They all appear to be links back to the blog itself or said support site. Speaking for myself I don't need a messiah figure to support elements of FOSS, and I don't need Stallman to be a decent or functional human being to have made good points in the past.

Speaking for myself the first HUGE red flag out of Stallman was his famous comment about pedophilia circa 2006, which this "Stallmansupport site" actually addresses.

https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...

The defense seems to be summed up in this line: "Whatever the reasoning that led Stallman to write those statements, the fact is that later he changed his mind."

It seemed pretty clear what he meant, and walking it back 13 years later under pressure doesn't make me think that he didn't mean it the first time.

our president and his friends are pedos.

I can't speak for Trump, but yes many of his friends are. As for Trump whether or not you believe he abused children, we know that was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting at least one person and is accused of much more.

None of which changes anything about how much a person should or shouldn't support Richard Stallman.

You can look at Trump’s comments about his own daughter to confirm that he’s at least attracted to underage girls.

He was also credibly accused of raping minors multiple times, although those accusers were too afraid (justifiably so) to let us see those accusations play out in court.

I'm not saying that he isn't, I'm saying that when we have STRONG evidence of his sexual assault of adults, and dozens of other felonies, we don't need to focus on the one for which no proof exists despite extensive attempts at finding some. It's not a denial of what he might have done, it's essentially a policy statement.

Edit To be entirely clear: I am not defending Trump, he should be in prison, not the White House.

This is the literally the point TFA is making.

That Stallman's statements were seen as a "red flag", while Bill Gates's dealings with Jeffrey Epstein were seen as perfectly ok.

The position of the website the blog links to and references makes a clear statement that Stallman has been framed and "cancelled"... not that he's as guilty as people like Gates.

The post is highlighting the discord between the MIT/associated media hit pieces on Stallman (free software advocate) for having problematic views, while compelling evidence of Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft) Epstein-class behavior was pretty much ignored.

I looked into this a year or so ago. My take away was that at some point someone published a very long piece which quotes stallman and step by step concludes "this is bad". And then people started quoting the piece conclusion. However I remember reading the originals from stallman and not finding anything wrong with them. (If someone wants to disagree please cite stallman, not someone else's conclusion about stallman.)

Cancellation is about a self-appointed minority taking malicious action against someone for an action or opinion for which the law itself does not specify a penalty. No one should be cancelled. And no one should be downvoted (or worse) on HN.

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