Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> This is why you should develop a second personality ... Why stop at two?
Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
411–420 of 580 posts
Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
>Or perhaps it's simply that in the abscence of religious structures the mob decides morality. I'm pretty sure this isn't what Nietzsche had in mind.
Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
#413Earlier 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…
I'm rather young, so I might be exactly the kind of person that you were. I think it's right to shut up when "logic" hurts people's feelings AND there's nothing to gain from saying it, but when there's an injustice and we can at least try to fight back, I think the right thing to do is just saying the "logical" truth, even if people's feelings get hurt. I don't mean to say that my view is always the correct one, but…
Given that your logic train might inspire others to get more insight and work on expanding your argument - or refuting it - "nothing to gain" is something that never happens.
Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t mean to sound snarky, but this really discounts so many factors in how autism is dealt with and even worse it makes it sound as if autistic people are unable to learn how their actions impact people around them, which is of course completely untrue. Autistic people may have difficulty interpreting things such as social cues, but they are absolutely not incapable. We have indications from many of those closest…
> how autism is dealt with Stallman was born 67 years a go. Autism wasn't even a thing. Until the 1980 it was diagnosed as schizophrenia and only in 1987 a checklist for diagnosing it was proposed Anyway, not caring too much about other people's feelings when people don't care too much about your medical condition is perfectly acceptable
Just like in the middle ages, there was only a single illness that caused fever (aptly named "fever"). More advanced illnesses required bacteria and viruses which were not invented until 1676 respectively 1892.
I wonder how genetic disorders worked back then considering genes didn't exist yet.
Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
#415His job, as the head of the FSF and GNU, was to represent those organizations to the public, which includes many people who don't know him. Being judged and vilified by people who don't know you is what happens to public figures. If your behavior brings disrepute on the organizations you represent, you should let those organizations find different representatives. RMS was right to step down. He is still free to say w…
Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first I heard was about how he was a guest in Denmark almost 30 years ago and fouled up his room. Nothing bad happened to him, he was lucky. Stallman had luck with public opinion many, many times. This time his luck changed. It's unfair to deplore the bad luck and forget about all the times he had benefited from good luck.
Nobody is talking about luck. He was the victim of an unfair and unjust attack by the media, who distorted his words in a disgusting way. There is no way to justify that by referring to his other behavior, no matter how bad it may be.
What I'm trying to say is that the two answers should be the same.
Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument isn't that enabling weird dudes to inappropriately hit on women is the progress we are after, that is a complete misunderstanding of the point. The argument is that often renegade and maverick thinkers are deeply deeply flawed on an individual level and would do stuff like that. This doesn't really fit well into the "progress category" of civil rights, it's more about advances in technology. TBH I don't…
I'm not sure that the entire careers of a Stallman or a Jobs are inseparable from them acting like dickheads at some point in their career. It may be the case that having "Future Stallman" or "Future Jobs" be persuaded to rein in their excesses (rather than being tolerated and encouraged to be raging assholes, at least in some contexts and ways) might be of benefit both to the people around them, but also, the talent…
Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The top-posted article/parent says this is exactly what happened to the Hot Ladies remark though! Someone else wrote it on his door, took a picture, and it was taken down!
Yet here you are referencing it as if it was something RMS actually did. How many other lies are being spread and believed due to the game of twitter telephone being played here?
Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
#419We 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…
The software development world is going through the growing pains of our largest and most influential organizations making that deal with the devil.
Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I've lost the line of thinking here. I thought we were talking about black face, and why people are offended by it. It's an offensive racial stereotype. I really don't see anything comparable about thugs. I'm not even clear on what you mean by thug outrage: is it that thugs exist? Is it media portrayal of thugs? Is it that thugs do or say bad things? I am honestly confused by this comparison.
My point is that "gangsta" rap music is every bit as offensive as blackface, perhaps even more. But outrage culture selectively applies the "harmful" argument to the latter, not the former. Nor do they make as a big deal of it.
Between blackface and gangsta rap, there is a difference in kind: Black face is emblematic of society itself continuing the practice of dehumanizing a group of people that historically were dehumanized and stripped of all freedom. Gangsta rap represents something that is not nearly as systemic.
That's somewhat beside the point though. You touch on a relevant question: Even if many fewer people are offended, they are still offended. So the question is, should society not urge any action at all for offensive speech? Should no one feel any pressure to modify their behavior in some way? If you don't want to go to those extremes, then you have to draw the line somewhere. Currently society draws the line at racist content, specifically that aimed at traditionally downtrodden minority groups, and even more specifically, those minority groups that still experience significant bias.
Why does society draw the line where it does? My guess is because the scars there are not completely healed over, even if society has "recognized the error of its way". On other stereotypes we aren't as adamant. Irish, for example. We don't view the drunken Irishman stereotype with quite the same shock, probably in part because the institutionalized oppression (In the US) has been mostly dead and buried for a 100 years. In the UK & Australia however, the wounds are more fresh, and reference to derogatory Irish stereotypes are much more taboo.