451–460 of 580 posts
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Can you explain why these opinions are inappropriate? What makes someone with aggressively libertarian views unsuitable to lead the Free Software Foundation?
Should a 10 year old be allowed to smoke, drink, and do harder drugs? If no then why should a 10 year old be able to pick their adult sex partner(s)?
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But ultimately in those alienating conclusions you were _right_, how do we forget this? What does it make us to disregard uncomfortable truths?
This sounds like how I used to think. A question from a mentor of mine: what does being right accomplish?
Not being wrong.
Which is often bad, sometimes very bad, like "you're dead" bad or "you killed somebody else" bad.
Being right is just like epidemic prevention or vaccines: if they work, you don't even notice.
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. Ju…
When nonconformity is the norm, it becomes conformity
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If there's one place in our society that should welcome discussion of ugly issues it should be our universities, particularly the few as storied as MIT.
It might be only CSAIL, not all of MIT, that made this call.
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> 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 Yes, if her behaviour was not workplace appropriate.
That's a different question. None of the stories about Stallman are from coworkers. They are from people who shared meals with him, people who attended talks he gave, or people who went to his office. In his position at MIT, Stallman did not teach classes. Anyone who didn't like his behavior was free to tell him off and/or leave. They would suffer zero consequences to their career or schooling. Also, I replied to som…
It's character assassination as a show of political strength, and as a warning to anyone else who does not submit completely to the narrative, that they will come after you. Well, warning received. I'll ramp up the pretending to be super woke in public. So will everyone else, and we will all know everyone else is pretending too, but there'll be nothing we can do about it because if we deviate from the narrative, most people will come after us to keep up the act in order to save themselves.
I'll be sure to only express opinions anonymously and in the privacy of the ballot box. The far left will keep wondering why it loses elections when everybody outwardly appears to agree with them, and will continue to fight to prevent anonymous forums, but tech will stay ahead of them . Note that Sarah Mei claims to be a die-hard contributor to open source, but has three github contributions in the last year. Yeah, these are not the people who are going to win the arms race when it comes to fighting this battle with technology.
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…
I agree. That's why I cancelled my recurring donations to the FSF after this debacle. There are other, more worthy causes than an organization which considers public opinion to be more important than integrity, an organization that essentially axes it's central figure because of some internet trolls.
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Those words didn't disappear and resurfaced from some secret tape or whatever. They're on his own blog, first-party information quoted all over the place, and recent email scandal just proves that he never really changed. Also, here's a quote of his about people with Down syndrome: > If you'd like to love and care for a pet that doesn't have normal human mental capacity, don't create a handicapped human being to be y…
The quoted sentence addresses the parents or potential parents who purposefully make mentally handicapped children, not the handicapped children. It's easy to make these kind of reading/comprehension mistakes when one gets caught up in cancel culture and their outrage mobs.
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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…
this is just incredibly stupid to believe, pro-paedophile commentary is acceptable? why in the ever living fk would that be aceptable? because a pedo might not actually commit those acts? are you stupid?
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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.
Do you think it was okay that he escaped censure so many times for no substantive/relevant reason? Do you think it's okay that he now is unfairly harshly censured, again for no substantive/relevant reason? What I'm trying to say is that the two answers should be the same.
If that is true, then no. I don't know the details of the other issues though.
> What I'm trying to say is that the two answers should be the same.
If the situations are truly mirror images, then yes my answers are the same. I'm skeptical that they are, though.
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…
If it's over then what pain does it cause HN to discuss it here?