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Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

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Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#151

Post by phkahler »

mjg59 wrote: post #96
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real problem with the culture today. People willfully, blatantly lying about other people to smear them and trying to convince everyone else to shun them as well.

I don't think it's unreasonable to interpret "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children" as a suggestion that there are circumstances under which paedophilia is OK. Suggesting that someone doing so is willfully, blatantly lying seems like an unsupported claim.

There is another sentence after the one you quote which takes the edge off it. Dropping that part could be construed as willfully taking his words out of context to makes them sound worse. IMHO taken as a whole I think it says more about his lack of understanding than him endorsing anything. But as you say, that's not blatant lying.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#152

Post by wishdasher »

bigtones wrote: post #87
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #8

I think it is strange that, on the one hand, the tech world has been advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people – society should accept that people on the autism spectrum are different and that’s OK. But at the same time RMS has been attacked for some statements very probably stemming from his autism that, while they may seem a bit shocking and at odds with the mainstream, were not illegal or intentionally of…

Selam Jie Gano, a female at MIT when he worked there wrote: “There is no single person that is so deserving of praise their comments deprecating others should be allowed to slide. Particularly when those comments are excuses about rape, assault, and child sex trafficking.”

If you read her post, she was an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering, and by her own admittance did not ever work nor interact with RMS at MIT.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#153

Post by astrange »

dralley wrote: post #65

IMO, Stallman is a good philosophical leader, but a terrible organizational leader. "On the board" is a decent compromise. But he has been a huge contributor to GNU's decent into irrelevance in recent years. As an organization, they're perpetually stuck in the 1990s.

FSFLA is actually pretty productive as I understand it. FSF US seems to spend all their time starting irrelevant political campaigns with terrible pun-based slogans.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#154

Post by klyrs »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #93
stonogo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did not remove the post, it's here: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun... And he didn't change his mind for over a decade, until he got in trouble for defending Marvin Minsky. I'm still not convinced his "updated opinion" would have happened without the scrutiny brought by the Epstein case.

Looks like he moved it to the archive section and dated it 2006 to show it is a very outdated view. Stallman is a very honest person and won’t try to hide the past. This comment used to be on one of the main info pages of the site.

That quote has been at that url since 2006

https://web.archive.org/web/20060821211348/https://www.stall...

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#155

Post by _nhynes »

konjin wrote: post #90
colechristensen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed autism poses a challenge for a person in a leadership position. One facet of autism is difficulty in certain social interactions and that difficulty can cause real harm to people. You shouldn't prejudge a person because of a diagnosis, nor should you pre-acquit. You can embrace acceptance that people are different and realize that differences make some people better and worse for certain things.

>You can embrace acceptance that people are different and realize that differences make some people better and worse for certain things. I find it astonishing that blatant abelism like yours is acceptable in polite society. >You can embrace acceptance that genders are different and realize that differences make some genders better and worse for certain things. >You can embrace acceptance that races are different and…

I thought that the parent post was diplomatic and well hedged, given the sensitivity of the subject material: "one facet [...] certain interactions [...] can cause [...]." Furthermore, the thesis that biology affects fitness is well established and is indeed essential to the process of evolution. Nature cannot be discounted, but, as I think you intend to emphasize, it's not the end of the discussion when humans can do so much at the application layer.

> [...] acceptance that genders are different [...]

Males are going to have a hard time being wet nurses.

> [...] races are different [...]

The San and Inuit people have some very useful adaptations for their respective extreme environments.

It's kind of challenging to take sweeping offense to a statement phrased using an existential quantifier.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#156

Post by rayiner »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #80
toiletfuneral wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah thats me, I don't care about 'intent' as much as 'outcome' All the well meaning in the world doesn't mean shit if you're creating hostility or demeaning others (that is not commentary on RMS, just in general)

I have never in my life seen so much hostility generated by good intentions as we are seeing now during this woke revolution. I repeat - never! And I lived through collapses of two failed states.

They may have good intentions, but they lack respect for established norms, and spend little time thinking about the function and purpose of those norms. They kick over Chesterton's fence and assume it was there because Chesterton was some sort -ist: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#157

Post by lfam »

geofft wrote: post #128
creamytaco wrote: post #34

Stallman is a bastion of software freedom in a world turning progressively dark. The fact that he never ever compromised his ideals and principles, never sold out and has been repeatedly proven prescient and absolutely on the money on countless issues, makes him someone that we should strive to protect. There are many invididuals in the Free Software world that backstabbed RMS and tried to destroy him with malicious…

Andy Wingo was and still is right, and more people should say it publicly. What he wrote then had been widely believed among many free software developers - including many who had worked closely with the FSF and with GNU - for years, but the public worship of RMS was too strong for any of the people doing the actual work to say anything without getting seen as traitors to the movement by people like you. He and the o…

I concur: Wingo's opinion is widely shared within GNU, and I wrote about it a few months ago, too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193674

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#159

Post by throwawaycdn12 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #106

Some context I got from https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of... : Stallman was pressured to resign from the board and MIT because of some of these controversies: - Jeffrey Epstein coerced one of his victims to have sex with Marvin Minsky. In an online thread, Stallman argued that this might not be sexual assault if Minsky didn't realize she was coerced. - 10 years ago, Stallman claimed that 14…

Canada only raised their age of consent from 14 to 16 in 2008. I don't think Canada should be cancelled as a result of this.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#160

Post by r3856283 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #146
r3856283 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't work with or for RMS longer than any other programmer, there are many who have longer. Gerald J. Sussman is a programmer and hired him at MIT and is still on the board of FSF and still working with him, that is over 40 years. And RMS has grown over the years. This is from over 20 years ago.

"for" and "with" are different words.

Sorry. Edited.
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