351–360 of 580 posts
Stallman resigned from MIT and the FSF. So why are we still talking about it? It's not going change any of this or exonerate his name. You only have one reputation and once it's damaged, it's very hard to recover. So all this talk is just arguments on the internet at this point. Time to move on. Also, I realize this is an unpopular opinion here because of the lack of awareness that most outside this community don't e…
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I'm copy-pasting a comment from earlier on because I got late to that discussion and it's doubly relevant when the standard here has gone down from "hindered the work of MIT/FSF" to "made XX-class people uncomfortable". -- I think the most interesting part of this gotterdamerung is the claim in “Remove Stallman appendix A” that if the work of a Great Genius hinders The work of some number of talented skilled folk, th…
The problem with your argument is that it implies that the people who were chased away from CSAIL, MIT or CS in general by people like Stallman were all planning to pile into a giant ineffective committee with each other and thus can be assumed to be No Great Loss, which is... a rather peculiar leap of logic. There's no reason to suppose this. Even accepting your logic, the people he discouraged from CS might have wo…
Stallman never chased away anybody from CSAIL
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Looks like healthy scepticism to me, which I consider a good thing.
One of those comments was in response to an article about Jimmy Savile[0]. Savile is estimated to have raped 589 children, including some as young as 8. I am "healthily skeptical" about the moral compass of people who use serial child rapists as a springboard to questions about consent on the part of minors. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scan...
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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…
But there's not.
It's all lies.
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I must admit I didn't know who Mr. Bushnell was, so I looked him up. Finding out about his dismissal from GNU Hurd back in 2003 was quite ironic to me: > RMS has now "dismissed" me as Hurd maintainer because I have publicly spoken against the GFDL, saying that a GNU maintainer must support and speak in favor of GNU policies. If this is really RMS's reason, then it means that he demands the right to control the speech…
One of the issues whenever this sort of cancelling occurs is of the people who come out of the woodwork to join in the calls, it turns out some of them have personal issues with the person aside from their contentious conduct. This is why these things, as others have mentioned, should be tried in official channels, not merely be executed in response to public attitudes and press releases.
So where are the blogs defending him written by all the women there were included in his culture of tolerance? I would upvote that!
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…
>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. This is why you should develop a second personality, at first it's exhausting but eventually you get the hang of it. >But maybe it's this fear that leads us rushing back to deep moral systems likes religious fantastics when their faith is questioned. Or perhaps…
Why stop at two?
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I don't understand why his pronoun scheme is antagonistic. He still respects that you want gender neutral pronouns, he just won't use they because he thinks they has a standard plural meaning. I don't understand why people have an obligation to use "they" specifically as long as they respect the gender neutral concept.
Because one basic way of showing any respect at all for someone is calling them by their preferred name and pronouns. Refusing to do so suggests that you somehow know someone else better than they know themselves. If someone is that upset about it they can seethe elsewhere on their own time, but when interacting with someone, just use their preferred name/pronouns.
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And here [0] is someone else who (by his own accord) worked with both RMS and Bushnell and is saying Bushnell is bullshitting and grinding an axe: [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/11744336549420... > Bushnell and I overlapped in our employment at FSF. ... The general culture of inclusiveness and tolerance that RMS fostered meant that, at least when I was there alongside Bushnell, that social circle i…
Thank you for the link. My impression is that RMS mainly had some opinions which were leftover from the “free love” movement of the 1960s and 1970s which were not particularly shocking or out of line back then, but are considered job-losing toxic opinions here in 2019. For the record, as someone who saw that whole movement first hand, I disagree with the whole “free love” movement and think sex should only be done in…