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Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

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Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#421

Post by Copernicron »

ralfd wrote: post #191
favorited wrote: post #5

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…

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…

It’s almost as though two people can see the same situations or behaviour and come to different conclusions as to the nature and motivation behind them. What is obviously sexist to one person might be normal behaviour to another.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#422

Post by DanBC »

strenholme wrote: post #327
input_sh wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness. June 28th 2003: http://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html > I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based…

I mention this elsewhere in this sub-thread, but RMS was not completely out of line in 2003 or 2006 writing those kind of things. It was an era when it was still an open question whether the Wikipedia should have pro-pedophilia advocacy in their entries. For the record, I have never endorsed those positions [1], but I also see that they were on the fringe of acceptable discussion at the time. [1] See https://en.wikip…

> It was an era when it was still an open question whether the Wikipedia should have pro-pedophilia advocacy in their entries.

NAMBLA and similar will take every opportunity to push pro-paedophile[1] and pro-abuse positions. Your example just speaks to the nativity of Wikipedia (and a bunch of other US tech companies) around people who commit contact offences against children.

But we need to be clear: this was not in anyway a mainstream position. It was a smallish number of child abusers gaming a system.

The most recent example isn't just about what he said though. It's about how he said it. And it's this that people find unacceptable. The discussion was about how to manage the potentially serious image problem when a high profile member of the organisation has been accused of sexually assaulting a child.

Either he doesn't know that this is the wrong time to say those things, or he does know and doesn't care, but either way it made it harder for other people to do their job - managing the comms of having your organisation financially linked to a high profile sex offender.

[1] I guess we need to say that some people with a sexual interest in children will not commit offences against children, and so some pro-paedophile commentary is acceptable.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#423

Post by likeclockwork »

zaroth wrote: post #82
flippinburgers wrote: post #67

If you read the article she notes that the infamous "hot ladies" photo was the result of someone else writing and then snapping that shot of his office door. People only see what they want to see. I see a bunch of people beating up on and attacking an awkward "nerd". It reminds me of high school.

But on Twitter all you see is this; https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1172283772428906496?s=21

Previously from Sarah Mei:

https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1073234104311734273

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#424

Post by ng12 »

input_sh wrote: post #306
strenholme wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> [P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness. June 28th 2003: http://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html > I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based…

Can you explain why these opinions are inappropriate? What makes someone with aggressively libertarian views unsuitable to lead the Free Software Foundation?

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#425

Post by ng12 »

input_sh wrote: post #373
mirimir wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, he actually wrote that under his real name? That was unwise. I wouldn't even say that as Mirimir. Except about prostitution and adultery, of course.

There was also one that I can't be bothered to find that goes something along the lines of "teens sext each other, therefore child pornography should be legal".

> There was also one that I can't be bothered to find

Then please don't post it. Lazy citation of original material is how we got here.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#426

Post by ng12 »

_skel wrote: post #122

His 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…

The issue is that Stallman has been this way for decades -- he's always been outspoken, nitpicky, and aggressively libertarian -- and FSF has flourished under his sole leadership.

It's only in 2019 that internet culture and clickbait media have made it a "problem". To me, that is significantly more harmful than any of the wonky things RMS sometimes says.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#427

Post by jamesrcole »

glangdale wrote: post #403
jamesrcole wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've finding it hard to understand what sort of progress is reached by, say, enabling weird dudes to constantly and inappropriately hit on women. I was reponding to these statements "there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. ... I still believe ... that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people ar…

You're looking for a neutral principle that doesn't exist. Why is the trajectory of society towards "evolving and improving" assumed here? Why is someone's view of what is "just and good" in the future automatically better? What if we wind up in a dystopia and reintroduce slavery? Is that automatically "better" because it's out there in the future? At this point people usually go looking for a get out of jail free ca…

The principle I'm arguing for does not involve any specific view of what "better" is.

A norm of shutting down someone whenever a number of people consider that person's views or actions to be offensive or harmful will stifle change. It will stifle all change and evolution of norms and beliefs. It's an authoritarian impulse that will only ratchet up restrictions on what can be said and done.

If such a norm had been in place in the last few hundred years, it would have severely hampered all the past changes that are now widely agreed to have been good things.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#428

Post by glangdale »

thatcat wrote: post #417
glangdale wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's no future Jobs or Stallman who is going to change the status quo of technology, but be agreeable and not neurotic.

First of all, this is bullshit. There are plenty of perfectly agreeable people in computing who have had massive impact. I've met Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, for example, and both were kind and pleasant people. I don't recall hearing that Berners-Lee is anything but pleasant. While there are plenty of disagreeable sorts (I hear Dijkstra was a bit of a Djick) there is by no means a hard and fast rule that those who change the status quo of technology are dickheads. And some of the people who were neurotic aren't necessarily bad to other people, and historically, it's easy to point to some people who might have had much saner lives but for the times they lived in (Alan Turing).

Second, even the people like Jobs and Stallman can moderate their toxic behavior towards other people if incentives are in place. That doesn't mean that they will be normal. They will almost certainly continue to be rude, abrupt, and a little weird. They don't have to be nice.

There's something bizarrely fetishistic about the assumption that letting people like Jobs and Stallman do whatever they want is essential to their success. It's like Delilah cutting Samson's hair and taking away his strength.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#429

Post by helen___keller »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #72

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.

I think the opposite conclusion is true. Society is entering a world of nonconformity with a very few exceptions. The problem is those few exceptions will absolutely ruin your life.

Any other period in human history you will find drastically more conformity. Just go back a few decades. Tattoos? Facial hair? Casual clothing? Female? Person of color? Openly not heterosexual, or not married and monogamous for that matter? Not a white male landowner? Don't show up to church every Sunday?

The further back you go in time, the more and more conformity was expected for those who wanted a good job or a position of power. Today is the least conformist society has been throughout history.

With a few exceptions. And those exceptions are ill defined and irrationally punished. And unfortunately for RMS, an email in support of an associate of Epstein was one of those exceptions.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#430

Post by glangdale »

jamesrcole wrote: post #427
glangdale wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're looking for a neutral principle that doesn't exist. Why is the trajectory of society towards "evolving and improving" assumed here? Why is someone's view of what is "just and good" in the future automatically better? What if we wind up in a dystopia and reintroduce slavery? Is that automatically "better" because it's out there in the future? At this point people usually go looking for a get out of jail free ca…

The principle I'm arguing for does not involve any specific view of what "better" is. A norm of shutting down someone whenever a number of people consider that person's views or actions to be offensive or harmful will stifle change. It will stifle all change and evolution of norms and beliefs. It's an authoritarian impulse that will only ratchet up restrictions on what can be said and done. If such a norm had been in…

I think you've 100% missed the point here, but it's late, and I can't channel any more of Stanley Fish's "The Trouble with Principle" (very recommended, and readable) at this hour.
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