131–140 of 580 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he had the capacity to comprehend any of this he wouldn't be the sort of person who talked about the Knight of Hot Ladies at work. Unless Garrett somehow turned out to be a some kind of medical expert, his opinion on Stallman is about valid as Stallman's on anyone else.
You don't have to be a doctor to diagnose asshole behavior.
It wasn't the Media Lab with which Richard had a position; it was MIT CSAIL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So by that logic, if there was a group of mostly autistic/aspie men and they felt unsafe around one neurotypical woman, she should be the one to lose her position at a university, lose her position at a nonprofit that she founded, and be kicked out on the street, right? "Feeling unsafe" is an absurd metric to use. Lots of things feel unsafe but are actually extremely safe. Many people feel unsafe flying on airplanes.…
Well, if she had a decades-long pattern of abusive and tasteless behavior towards people with less power than her, such that people went out of their way to avoid interacting with her at all, then yeah, I’d say hit the bricks. You’re tilting at strawmen to get around the fact that Stallman can’t seem to control his inappropriate behavior. This isn’t a hypothetical, perfectly spherical, frictionless situation, this is…
1. https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrac...
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“The first” is neither what has happened with Stallman, nor is it what I describe in my comment. Many incidents have occurred, enough to demonstrate that they’re a trend rather than “the first” one-off. Many folks have noted that most people in Stallman’s position would have chose to learn to be better people to those around them. He did not make that choice, and the result is that many stories told about him paint h…
>Many incidents have occurred, enough to demonstrate that they’re a trend rather than “the first” one-off. Are people deliberately ignoring the fact that his guy is mentally ill? You're ascribing neurotypical social requirements to someone who is demonstrably not capable of them, and then acting surprised when he breaches said decorum. >Please don’t use threats here; “I better not see anyone here [any action here]” h…
In parenting, this phrase typically replaces ABC with “punish you”, “hit you”, “spank you”.
Your construction buries the implied violence of that phrase by leaving off the “or else”, but that does not resolve the inappropriateness of threatening “or else” on this forum.
The fact that one is neuro-atypical doesn't mean one cannot also be an asshole. RMS was both, and people finally got fed up with the latter bit.
He's a bad representative for neuro-atypicals
> He takes everything literally and doesn’t necessarily take feelings and the reactions of others into account when making statements that are outside the bounds of his expertise in free software. Whelp, then no one should be that surprised when people stop taking his feelings into account and decide they no longer want to be associated with him. Not being an asshole is a two-way street.
there's a large contingent of people on hn (in tech, in the world) that fetishize "logic" and believe it always trumps "feelings". i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form. i too used to be quite fond of making completely dispassionate arguments about controversial things (race, gender, class, etc.) because i believed that the entire con…
> He takes everything literally and doesn’t necessarily take feelings and the reactions of others into account when making statements that are outside the bounds of his expertise in free software. Whelp, then no one should be that surprised when people stop taking his feelings into account and decide they no longer want to be associated with him. Not being an asshole is a two-way street.
He’s autistic. Suddenly the people who were annoyingly vocal about being “inclusive” are forgetting Stallman’s disability. He says “creepy” things because he doesn’t understand social cues or casual communication at a certain level. Everyone in this thread demonizing RMS should be ashamed of themselves. This is the same reason why he can’t hold a relationship, or why he sleeps in his office. He’s just far out there -…
We are, sadly, entering a new age of conformity. Aligning yourself with what main stream society thinks is correct is now more important than anything else. The response of course is that "bad behavior should never be excused, regardless of ability!" which leads to a losing argument in which we try to say what kind of good excuses what kind of bad. But this presupposes the conformist stance: that fitting in with the…
I don't see much evidence of that. "SJWs" have had problems with him for years and nothing happened... until now.
What's different this time? Stallman's comments on Epstein added to the embarrassment of MIT. He waded into a political bonfire and added fuel. The last thing MIT needs is someone affiliated with MIT with a history of (at least sounding like he was) defending pedophilia holding forth on the Epstein saga in any way whatsoever, let alone by apologizing for or at least minimizing his actions.
This time he embarrassed and offended much more powerful people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's a large contingent of people on hn (in tech, in the world) that fetishize "logic" and believe it always trumps "feelings". i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form. i too used to be quite fond of making completely dispassionate arguments about controversial things (race, gender, class, etc.) because i believed that the entire con…
The whole point of rational dispassionate discussion is exactly because everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion. Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme. I mean lets pretend its true. So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to en…
> He takes everything literally and doesn’t necessarily take feelings and the reactions of others into account when making statements that are outside the bounds of his expertise in free software. Whelp, then no one should be that surprised when people stop taking his feelings into account and decide they no longer want to be associated with him. Not being an asshole is a two-way street.
there's a large contingent of people on hn (in tech, in the world) that fetishize "logic" and believe it always trumps "feelings". i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form. i too used to be quite fond of making completely dispassionate arguments about controversial things (race, gender, class, etc.) because i believed that the entire con…