251–260 of 580 posts
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…
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>> Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him > Umm.... absolutely not. These quotes (directly from his site) beg to differ: Do you know him? Aren't you vilifying him? Having an unpopular opinion isn't grounds for "proper judgement" of being constantly harassed by a mob every time his name is brought up.
I don't personally know Charles Manson, but I think he is definitely deserving of vilification. Now, that doesn't mean that RMS (or anyone else) absolutely certainly deserves being vilified by people who don't know them, but the entire premise is false: knowing someone (personally, I assume is the implication?) is not a necessary condition for condemning their behavior.
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Why so black and white? OP’s saying that there are other things besides “logic” (which is often itself just masked “feelings” from someone unaware of their own biases) that are relevant to the problems of the world; not saying that logic altogether is abhorrent and shutting “all logical arguments that come their way” down. You ought to inspect why you yourself are getting defensive over that statement.
I'm not getting defensive I'm pointing out an argument that stems from feelings and is only supported by feelings has no basis in discussion, since they are not axioms for discussion but subjective. The OP starts out dismissing logical arguments and then pats himself on the back for seeing through the grand conspiracy of analytical thought.
In particular, OP does not claim that logic is not a useful tool for discussion. OP seems to claim that it’s use to shut down important voices and experience that isn’t framed in those terms, by people who don’t have the power to be heard, allows those who do to deny those people inclusion into discussion. OP even says that he fights fire with fire, ie uses logic against logical people to try to bring those silenced people’s experiences into conversation.
I see your dismissal of OP’s argument, as an example of OP’s point. Not only does the “facts” your pointing out seem awfully defensive to a personal, emotional image of “logicalness” that OP’s point calls into question (ie your “facts” aren’t just “facts”), but the next step is to call for that line of thought to be dismissed entirely because it stands outside your personally invested framework.
Nor do I fundamentally agree that statements made from feelings have no place in discussion just because they aren’t framed in the same logical framework as the hyper rational people who shoot those types of statements down. People’s feelings are typically based on lived experience relevant to a topic and contain content that, while not neatly packaged into the cogent, easily digestible logical argument you’re looking for, remain informative for ethically ambiguous topics.
To tie it to the literal situation that Stallman has found himself in, he has made dispassionate arguments about things like children being able to consent to sexual encounters with adults. If you’re expecting an abused child to give you a well formed, logical argument for why those actions are or are not ethical, then you’ve found quite the exceptional victim. Otherwise, the lack of that argument effectively silences the child’s ability to convey the importance of their trauma, and empowers influential people like Stallman to make those hyper-rational arguments that ignore and actively erode those people’s legitimate experiences.
It’s the adults who listen to the incoherent pain of those children, who are able to have those children’s voices heard in discussion, and therein lies the value of listening to, not dismissing, “emotional” appeal in debate.
Stallman’s case is a very cut and dry example of the kind of dispassion that represents my take of OP’s post, about how excessive application of “logic” corrodes productive discussion. This doesn’t just happen to children, this happens to capable adults whose cultural backgrounds (non-Western bluntness? doesn’t speak your language?), or complicated circumstances (traumatized rape victim?) make speaking clearly, logically and dispassionately about an ethical issue difficult.
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…
Yes there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. Stallman was viewed as a toxic individual who caused harm, and this is what our society is trying to weed out. I still believe, perhaps naively, that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you. And this is something that everyone needs to do, w…
No, it's really not. If we want to say "without physically, financially or maybe emotionally in an extreme way" then yes. If we're talking about having healthy debate while making sure no one's feelings get hurt then we are truly and totally fucked.
Also, you can't make a worthwhile argument and use politically charged words like "toxic". What the fuck does toxic mean? When a person is expressing anger? When a man is expressing manliness?
My consolation is that eventually the pendulum will swing and smug idiots like you will be the target of the very thing you've helped create and then you will (probably) learn your lesson.
My larger hope is that the Idiocracy your generation is fostering will consume itself soon and skip my son's generation.
When you say "our society" you mean "your society" -- the one that you hope is going to benefit you the most at the expense of others.
Destroying careers in the court of public opinion is madness. If you can't see that you're part of the problem.
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Stallman did not defend Epstein in any way, shape, or form.
He minimized it. What he intended to do doesn't matter. That's not my point. What matters is that his words could be interpreted that way and that he was affiliated with MIT.
> (Now) Labor Secretary Acosta's plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein was not only extremely lenient, it was so lenient that it was illegal. I wonder whether this makes it possible to resentence him to a longer prison term. I disagree with some of what the article says about Epstein. Epstein is not, apparently, a pedophile, since the people he raped seem to have all been postpuberal. By contrast, calling him a "sex offender" tends to minimize his crimes, since it groups him with people who committed a spectrum of acts of varying levels of gravity. Some of them were not crimes. Some of these people didn't actually do anything to anyone. I think the right term for a person such as Epstein is "serial rapist."
Stallman called Epstein's sentencing extremely lenient to the point of being illegal, and that calling him a "sex offender" was too weak of a term and that he prefers to call him a "serial rapist".
Here[0] is a post by someone else who (by his own account) "worked for RMS longer than any other programmer." While he obviously has had a long relationship with Stallman, one of his key takeaways was: "RMS’s loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because the…
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You may find, as you age, that this viewpoint takes on nuance. Yes, we should root our world in scientific thinking. We should approach problems logically. We should make our decisions rationally. We should be efficient in how we allocate our resources. But there are times when being human outweighs those interests. There are times when we should be deliberately inefficient because too much efficiency can cause harm.…
But ultimately in those alienating conclusions you were _right_, how do we forget this? What does it make us to disregard uncomfortable truths?
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Why so black and white? OP’s saying that there are other things besides “logic” (which is often itself just masked “feelings” from someone unaware of their own biases) that are relevant to the problems of the world; not saying that logic altogether is abhorrent and shutting “all logical arguments that come their way” down. You ought to inspect why you yourself are getting defensive over that statement.
I'm not getting defensive I'm pointing out an argument that stems from feelings and is only supported by feelings has no basis in discussion, since they are not axioms for discussion but subjective. The OP starts out dismissing logical arguments and then pats himself on the back for seeing through the grand conspiracy of analytical thought.
Similarly, it’s often helpful to recognize that there’s some social currency to be gained by compromising on low-priority issues that you can spend to get people on board with your high-priority ones— people will pay more attention to the objections of someone who’s generally agreeable than someone who has a reputation of complaining about everything.
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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 -…
If you have a condition where you have trouble interacting socially with people, while also running an influential organization and acting as its figurehead, you need to be able to mitigate these issues. If this means you have an assistant who you run emails by before sending them, so be it. If your assistant also takes a look at your office (given to you as a favor by a respected educational institution) and tells y…
No, because obviously, his contributions to free software are more important then him making women uncomfortable in their workplaces/places of study/conferences. /snark