Millions read it only because of the backlash, but what about all the people who didn't speak up because of the fear of getting abused by angry mobs and fired? You can't pretend a censorship attempt isn't one just because it backfired and failed.
1,050 karma · joined December 4, 2018
Your quote is a response to throwawaysea's comment, which is clearly much more general than that:
>Leaving aside culture wars waged by individuals, I see institutional tightening on free speech all over America. I see it in big tech companies, where only a progressive monoculture exists with no psychological safety for other viewpoints. I see it in censorship applied by defacto digital public squares like YouTube. I see it in the left's rampant use of deplatforming to silence opposing views. Increasingly, I also see it in universities (see this incident at the University of Washington today https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-university-of-was...).
I didn't read his essay or follow this case at all, but from Wikipedia it seems he was arguing that biological differences between the sexes are a driving factor for the lack of women programmers at Google. That's a position that's solidly backed by the science.
I don't think so. Is anyone proposing this as a solution? The parent certainly doesn't seem to be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120806
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103133
I imagine however that most legislatures get around the issue by having explicit paragraphs establishing harsher punishments for violent rape vs mutually-accepted statutory rape.
I'm partial to the term "Libre" myself, though in this case it doesn't matter much, since it's a concept that people aren't familiar with anyway and you have to explain it no matter what word you use.
The only reason "sexual assault" covers what allegedly took place is because the expression was redefined in the first place to cover two separate things, which is exactly the problem. Stallman called not for redefining "sexual assault" as you put it, but for undoing a redefinition that puts it at odds with how those terms are conventionally used and causes unnecessary confusion.
>A December, 2001, Wired magazine article titled “The Geek Syndrome” paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome. In many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the Wired article are eerily similar to the ones offered by Lippman. Stallman also speculates about this. In the interview for a 2000 profile for the TorontoStar, Stallman said he wondered if he were “borderline autistic.”
>In recent years, Lippman says she has taken to reading books about autism and believes that such episodes were more than coincidental. “I do feel that Richard had some of the qualities of an autistic child,” she says. “I regret that so little was known about autism back then. ”Over time, however, Lippman says her son learned to adjust. By age seven, she says, her son had become fond of standing at the front window of subway trains, mapping out and memorizing the labyrinthian system of railroad tracks underneath the city.
>Watch the Stallman gaze for an extended period of time, and you will begin to notice a subtle change. What appears at first to be an attempt to intimidate or hypnotize reveals itself upon second and third viewing as a frustrated attempt to build and main-tain contact. If his personality has a touch or “shadow” of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome, a possibility that Stallman has entertained from time to time, his eyes certainly confirm the diagnosis. Even at their most high-beam level of intensity, they have a tendency to grow cloudy and distant, like the eyes of a wounded animal preparing to give up the ghost. My own first encounter